Dear BAF members and possible members,

A lot of people have been asking about what’s happening this year, sorry
for the delay in contacting you all.

The Committee have found it very hard work to put the Art Trail on the
last few years, where we have struggled to get active support of members in the
hard graft of getting the trail on. This year the amount of Committee
members has dropped further. The Trail also relies on use of joint venues,
and unfortunately this year venues we have previously used have either
disappeared, become too expensive or are in too precarious a financial
position to use. Add into the mix a pregnant Chair, a Vice Chair with a
new born, a pregnant Acting Secretary, and unfortunately the Committee have
come to the sad conclusion that the Trail will not happen this year.

However this doesn’t mean the end of BAF, just a re-think. We know that
many of you enjoy the opportunity to open you homes for the trail and to
showcase your skills, but also the bottom-line is increasingly to be able
to sell those skills. Therefore we have been thinking about how to make
everyone’s time and money work harder and more effectively for us.

Two front running ideas are a Pop-Up shop near to Christmas and an
e-marketing/online shop. Both are things we’ve spoken about before, and it
would be good to gauge your support (in body and in spirit) for either
idea. Also if anyone has any other ideas or would like to be an active
part of the new direction, please get in touch. And it’s important to stress
that just because there is no 2012 trail, that future trails are still
possible. But all of these ideas can only happen with the support and
activity of ALL the members, not just a committee of 6 people.

For the moment there won’t be any group meetings, but please do feed back
your thoughts and we will schedule a meeting once appropriate.

See you soon!

Bristol Art Fringe Committee