Keeper Gallery – an initiative of Gaffa

As a part of its recent incarnation, Gaffa has implemented a new initiative in which it continues to nurture and sustain relations with emerging artists, makers and curators.

Keeper Gallery offers an emerging curator a gallery space to direct an exhibition program for the period of six months to a year. This aims to be an ongoing project, offering emerging curators from a wide range of arts disciplines the opportunity to show a fresh diversity of ideas and curatorial approaches.

Keeper Gallery encourages the guest curator/director to push boundaries, to promote the experimental and to give opportunity to works that might never have a chance to be shown in a gallery context before.

"Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, or archive) is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections. The object of a traditional curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be inter aliaartwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections. More recently, new kinds of curators are emerging: curators of digital data objects, and biocurators."

Director Zoe Brand

Zoe Brand will be taking control of the inaugural reigns of Keeper Gallery in 2010.

Keeper Gallery will take its lead focus from Brand’s background in Contemporary Jewellery and Object Design. Exhibiting experimental works from established jewellers, crafters and designers as well as championing a new crop of emerging young guns.

Zoe Brand is a maker, wearer and viewer of all things (contemporary) jewellery. In 2008, after three years hard slog she completed her Advanced Diploma in Jewellery and Object design. Brand has spent 2009 curating a few exhibitions, making some jewellery and trying to get her head around the ‘real world’.