We aim to educate and promote the art of Glass beadmaking in New Zealand, preserve the traditions of the art form and encourage the continued renaissance of contemporary glass beadmaking.

Presidents Report 2010 - Lisa-Jane Harvey

It’s been a rocker of a year and we hope that our efforts have been viewed as positive from the NZGBA members as well as the greater arts community. One of the primary goals for the NZGBA for the last year was to increase the New Zealand awareness of lampworking and draw the community closer together.

The initiatives taken for 2009 were:

-       To increase the number of exhibitions

• We ran our first wearable glass exhibition through Andrew Firth’s studio and shop over the New Year period, this event not only increased awareness in the local community but also brought the lampworking community together and we hope new initiatives in this area will have a similar result
• We have secured an exhibition for October 2010 called Lucent which entries will be called for in July 2010
• We have also secured a very challenging and thought provoking exhibition “Bead Archaeology” for 2011

-       Create awareness in the greater glass community

• We secured participation for lampworkers in the NZSAG glass book initiative
• we shared the stand with NZSAG in the Royal Easter show and were included in our own category in the art awards
• In addition we secured sponsors for each category in the bead competition including suppliers and associated industries such as Gaffer, Bullseye fused glass through Claudia Borella, Annie Rose who are ever supportive, Born to Bead supporting beginners and The Beadhold who sponsored the jewellery category this year

-       Have a platform to network lampworkers

• we updated the website to include user participation functionality
• Quarterly newsletter is now automated to some extent from the website
• Showcase section on the new website
• Ability for artists to add their own posts to the website and comment on other posts
• Increase traffic and user participation of the website

-       Increase lampwork community initiatives to improve artist awareness within the group

• Karen Mitchell started the bead exchange
• Annual raffle saw record fundraising and we aim to improve each year giving us funds for exhibitions etc
• Increased the library although would suggest next year we find a way to have this be better utilised, the first step was to increase member fees by $5 giving us a surplus to add new books and have the library free to use by all members

I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank the 2009 committee for their very hard work and of course the previous years committee for the platform they left on which we were able to grow our efforts.

 We did have an item that was not followed up on from last year and that was to specifically thanks Isla Osborne for her efforts in the previous two years of participating in the committee and would like to suggest we carry that forward for the new team to action.

Thank you again for the last year it has been great fun and I feel we have achieved some items and look forward to refining our processes in the years ahead.