The Pearls & The Oyster

Dear Supporters, Thank you so much for your donations. We are very grateful for your support. We are writing to share an important update regarding our funding model. As you know, our initial approach was the ‘All or Nothing’ model, where we would only receive the funds if we reached our target. Unfortunately, we are unable to access grants to boost the donations in our crowdfunding. Because of this, we have decided to change our funding model to ‘Keep What You Raise’. This means that we will keep all the funds raised, regardless of whether we reach our target or not. We believe this change will provide us with a better opportunity to continue our project and deliver on our promises to you, our incredible backers. In short it means we can still program and pay our visiting professional artists to work with us at The Birley to deliver critiques and talks to our creative community for free. We understand that this is a significant change, and we want to assure you that this decision was not made lightly. But we hope that you will feel that it is the right way to proceed. Please feel free to reach out to us at jaynesimpson73 @gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns about this change. We are here to answer them. Thank you once again for your understanding and continued support. Jayne

Our exhibition 'The Pearls & The Oyster' has now finished after a 5 week run and almost 500 visitors, some brilliant feedback and a number of generous contributions to our fund. We want to say a huge thank you to all of the artists exhibiting with us and contributors, visitors, old friends and many new. Even though we did not reach our original target, what we have raised will go towards our wonderful visit and talk from Hettie Judah which was a huge success, our review of the exhibition with Corridor 8 and we will now plan for artist talks and critiques we can offer to the public for free and pay our artists. Thank you so much again for the generous contributions and brilliant support from our Preston community, LCC and beyond, we have certainly put Preston on the map for Contemporary Painting!!