Report on the AGM 9th October 2019

The AGM was held in the beautifully formal space of the Mayor’s Room at the Hawthorn Arts Centre. The cost of the evening included not only tea, coffee and biscuits but also support technical staff to connect John’s computer to the large screen. It was all extremely civilised!

Our guest speaker was Stuart Purves, Director of Australian Galleries. Stuart spoke with enthusiasm about sculptors and sculpture - and about his sculpture park under development at Porcupine Ridge.. Regards installing sculpture - "You can't tell me anything about cranes & trucks that I don't already know" - from this you can gather that the new sculpture park features large to monstrous scale works - remnants of Sculpture by the Sea and such exhibitions. He does intend to have space for smaller works - maquettes and others requiring some shelter but the main emphasis is on the large works - which sell quite slowly compared to paintings. Of the 178 sculptures installed there have been 5 Sales of approximately $100,000 each.

Following our guest speaker we had a break for tea, coffee and a chat and then on with the formal AGM:

President’s Report – Gillian Govan

Treasurer’s Report- John Ride

Subcommittees:

Monthly Activities- Gillian Govan

Membership- Jackie Mackinnon

Annual Exhibition- Yvonne Monik

MIFGS- Paul Cacioli- 

Tesselaar Exhibition- Mark Cowie

Newsletter & Websites- Jenny Rickards

Herring Island- Jenny Rickards & Gillian Govan

Social Media- Elnaz Nourizadeh

Items to note from the meeting include that Gillian has served more than her fair share of time as president and this year is intended to be one where some lucky person learns what is involved in the presidency and figures out how to make the job their own - (hint: Gillian works too hard)

Jackie Mackinnon was thanked for her work as membership officer and we welcomed Monica Mauer Jan to the position.

There was brief mention of the difficulties we encountered with the Annual & Awards Exhibition. This has been covered in previous newsletters and we are hoping never to repeat the lessons learned.

There was an overall description of the interlinking of the main ASV website, our newsletter website and our administrative backroom that spans the website and Google Drive. Social media covers our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram presences and our use of Mail Chimp for exhibition invitations. The meeting agreed that the invitation for Michael Meszaros’s upcoming solo exhibition should be circulated to our Mail Chimp list.

Having received the reports we proceeded to the election of office bearers. Thank you to past officers and welcome to new ones. The revised list is on the back page of the newsletter.

Also could all members check the link to their own sculpture websites from their profile page on the ASV website. Many are missing the required http:// or https:// prefix required to make them intelligible to browsers and thus create a link.

The meeting finished before 10 - thank you to all who attended.

Activities for 2020 must surely include an outing to Porcupine Ridge.... Do we have an organiser for the trip?