Introduction

Hello to you all (especially those I have yet to meet). As requested, a bit of background:

I started out with a traditional Scottish education, where the normative assumption at that time was that anyone male will be an engineer in adult life and that you will be beaten with a leather strap by your teachers.

I attempted to be an engineer, but dropped out of university after the first year in order to undertake the much more fulfilling job of hitching around Europe and getting wasted.

Having 'found' myself I went to university again, this time to study drama with the sadly-to-be-frustrated ambition of becoming an actor, writer and director. After producing a lot of very worthy but unpopular experimental theatre I realised that a successful career in theatre involved doing lots of crap jobs, such as panto, so I decided to go another route, which eventually led me to curating visual art.

I operate across several fields - curator, educator, consultant - and my current main things are Wirksworth Festival, where I curate the visual arts programme (www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk), re:place, a 2-year programme of site-specific commissions across Derbyshire (www.re-place.co.uk), and work with schools through Creative Partnerships. There's a bit more background stuff on my embarrassingly unfinished website (www.davidgilbert.org.uk).

I am interested in the Situation of art, and site-responsiveness, but I also feel the need to have an emotional response to art in order to like it - I want to laugh, cry ...

Looking forward to working with everyone.