We spoke to Lizzie, our Exhibitions intern who led the curation of The Lightbox’s recently opened show ‘Highlights from the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham’ to find out a little more about what was involved.

My very first curated show opens this week at The Lightbox. After months of meetings, preparing lectures, building frames, writing text panels, and countless hours fighting with InDesign the show is finally ready.

When I began my internship here at The Lightbox, one of my tasks was to help put together a new show that would help build a strong relationship between UCA and The Lightbox and showcase student photographic work. I was absolutely thrilled to be tasked with this project and couldn’t wait to get started.

One of my favourite parts of orchestrating this exhibition was selecting the work. I had an entire classroom full of art work at my disposal and I admit it was a bit overwhelming. Selecting work is tricky, we needed work that would represent the amazing talents of the UCA students, along with showing the diversity of photography but also work that would be easy to showcase. With the assistance of UCA photography professor Anna Fox, I riffled through countless students work books, contact sheets, and portfolios to select the very best works for the show.

One of the largest challenges of the show was physically getting all the work together. The selections we had made were just from work books and contact sheets. Very few of them were finished works that were ready to be hung in a gallery. The wonderful technicians at UCA kindly assisted us in resizing, editing, printing, and mounting all work for the show. Without the help of Beytan Erkmen, David Summerill, and Paul Corcoran this show would not have been possible.

Thanks to the guidance of the wonderful exhibitions team and all the hard work put in by the UCA technicians, Photo 1st, Natasha Caruana, and of course, Anna Fox. The show is finally now up and ready for the public - I hope you enjoy it.

‘Highlights from the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham’ is open until 31 January, free entry.

Image credits: Image banner Untitled from Pond Series by Emily McDonald © The Artist; detail of Distorted Memory 2015 by Elizabeth Ransom © The Artist; Art Fund Prize Gallery © The Lightbox