I Held A Secret Exhibition in The Staff Room.
@befmakes , 12/06/2025 and 1/07/26
photo credits @befmakesart
Today, I was going through a bunch of stuff i had in the office, drawings, ideas, paper work etc. and i came across this poster. I had totally forgotten about it but loved the idea. I wanted to hold a pop-up exhibition in the staff room. Drawings on fridges, screen-printed tea towels, mugs - the lot. Only problem is.... I leave this job next Friday. So, can i do it? Let's see.
Note: I love this job and i feel so lucky and grateful that I've had the opportunity. I am going to miss it so much. Leaving with an exhibition feels like a good way to go.
First thing i did was head online. I made a series of scans recently called 'Things I Found on my Desk' which is exactly that, scans of things i found on my desk. Instead of blowing the up and making large prints, I got a set of 4 coasters printed with the images. They cost £16 total.
Next up, I like interactive elements to my installations so i had a quick think. The summer at work, i call 'Puzzle Season', because last year we did quite a few puzzles on our breaks. I'm sad to be missing it this year so i figured I'd make a puzzle for the staff room. This might be a bit of a cop out, but the puzzle is the poster above. That was £18.00.
Keeping on the theme of interactive, i thought it would be funny to make some postcards so people can send them to their loved ones seeing as they're at work for 40 hours a week. I looked around online but figured i would just make them myself so that's tonight's task. They're going to have 'Dear,' written at the top and then 'Sending love from the Staff Room,' at the bottom as a sign off. I hope people send them to each other through internal post but i will never know....
In a perfect world, i would've not forgotten about the idea and then i would've hand-built some mugs, illustrated them with underglaze and fired them myself. Alas, i forgot. So instead, i headed over to Vistaprint and bought 6 mugs for £4.99 each for a total of £29.94. There's something quite fitting about choosing the corporate, soulless method to produce work when creating it for a corporate space. Into the cupboards they go! The mugs all have drawings i made which reflects the feelings and ideas i had about trying to be an artist and an employee and finding the balance between art and work. That's going to be the main theme for the whole installation.
photo credits, Vistaprint, 2025
Each of the mugs have the exhibition poste on the back. Again, playing with the idea of commercialism and capitilism, everythign has to be merch.
Anyhow. I'll update you further when i make some progress. Exhibition T-4 days.
Today, i scoped out the staff room. There's loads of good wall space for A1 or A2 prints, but i am unable to fix anything to the walls. i do have a projector though, so I'm pondering about that.
there is room for a plinth if i can source one, otherwise the sculptures will have to go on the side tables and I'm not sure how much it will look like an exhibition rather than just an interior make over of the room.
I did have some other ideas to embed some fun into the everyday, like putting a bubble blowing wand inside the washing up liquid and making a tea towel with a wordsearch on it.
my other question, is should the exhibition look like an exhibition or should i lean more into the 'secret' element and the 'undercover artist' theme from a few years ago and instead make small pockets of joy for people to find if they look? What i mean by that is should the walls be full of work or should the cupboards have miniature installations inside?
this is a call for staff rooms to improve generally though. Ours has so much potential. If there was a frame on the wall or even a shelf there would be so much more life that could be added. It's also not wheelchair accessible which is a much larger problem. or should the exhibition facilitate art and creativity? A cupboard cleared out and filled with papers, collage materials and a cutlery drawer filled with pens and sharpies?
The final ponder for today is - i don't want to take in loads of stuff and have to haul it around when i will also need to clear my desk and walk everything home. Some the smaller, foldable or leave-in-the-staff-room-able it is, the better.
Oops, it's 2026 now. I found this draft and wanted to complete it.
In the end i went for a trio of A4 drawings in black frames to finish off the work. The frames were re-used from some workplace awards i won slightly earlier in the year. I had them placed along the entrance of the staffroom to hint at what's to come.
Once i left that job i got a message from the Estates team saying that they liked the work and were going to hang them inside the staffroom so there is a permanent element to the show still up to this day.
Sadly in true 9-5 fashion there are just some things i didn't do. The main one being, photograph the actual instalation so i suppose it was a very secret exhibition that noboday will ever know how it looked. Oops!
I have a new job now, and a new staffroom so let's see what we can get up to there! Next time i'll document it better!
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