Arts Council proposed letter

We’d really appreciate if you could advise us how best to approach the Arts Council to help fund a bloody brilliant event/exhibition/initiative which we will carry out at the Brighton Fringe Festival this year.

To summarise very quickly what this is (in confidence):

Title: Open Art Surgery

Concept: Given the increasing numbers of academically qualified artists, some educated even to PhD level (there now exist Doctors of Art), the concept of an Art Surgery modelled around the idea of a Medical Doctor's Surgery would be interesting to experiment with.

Location: We have in the past six months, through meetings and discussions negotiated the ideal space, a glass fronted area, which is part of a medical doctor’s surgery, near Grand Parade campus, University of Brighton. Doctors, managers and staff at the surgery are completely behind the idea. (Astonishingly there is a medical doctor at the practice with the same surname as one of our number another Dr. Gilhooly! ). In effect this represents significant support in kind.

Attached please find:
· the slides we developed as part of these discussions
· an initial Process Flow Diagram describing the system

In addition we’re carrying out trials, discussing further, deciding on how we get the balance right between the inherent comedic aspect (our plans include the use of scanners, aesthetics (instead of anaesthetics) for etc.) and the very pertinent questions being raised. Also we are considering how all this will look in between activities, how we exhibit, there might be an audio element and lighting for example. Once again the medical Doctors are very interested in this and support that too. We’ve created a blog to store the discussion and share ideas, which is only accessible at present to the three of us but we might publish later. In addition there are considerations regarding what peripheral events, talks, academic or otherwise to arrange.

To do this properly we need adequate funding. None of us has the private income to support fully though we are all prepared to contribute a certain amount of cash and time. Costs would including marketing, getting the right technical support, documentation and hopefully covering some of our own time.