Your stories

Dave Blenkey is LeftLion's Artistic Director. He's organised an exhibition at the Maltcross (until 14 March) to celebrate LeftLion's five years in Nottingham and the hard work of its contributors.

The exhibition shows how much talent there is in Nottingham, is the city unique in its creativity?

I think every city is unique in its creativity.

Nottingham certainly contributes its fair share of art, and we seem to be particularly well represented by film-makers and photographers.

People looking at Leftlion exhibition

I've also been amazed by how many talented illustrators have come out of the local woodwork in the last year.

Nottingham Trent University is also nationally renowned for the quality of its art-based courses, so the city should definitely be proud of its artistic offerings.

If you could pick one piece, from the exhibition, to hang on your wall what would it be and why?

That's a tough question. There are several pieces in the exhibition which I would like to own, particularly some of Sasha Leech's oil paintings.

But, if I could only pick one, I would go for Rob White's 'Goth Plumber' illustration (see above). It's only a small print and very simple - one character drawn on a white background - but has a certain quality to it which keeps drawing me back to it.

How difficult was it to curate the show? Presumably you had to leave some work out?

In some ways it was easy - we knew that the bulk of the work would come from our archive, so we knew what we had to work with; and in other ways it was difficult.

We commissioned some new works by artists along the theme of human interaction in the city and didn't know exactly what we were going to get until the work turned up.

We wanted to strike a good balance between illustration and photography and augment that with other styles of work such as the two video installations and Gavin Darby's iron man sculpture.

The art-work at Leftion exhibition

As we have had a lot of contributors over the years, the work covers a wide range of styles, which is something we wanted to make sure was apparent in the final selection.

We also didn't want to favour any individual style or artist too heavily at the expense of excluding others.

I think we have got the balance pretty much spot on. One thing we certainly didn't have to worry about was the quality of work - we could have probably filled a second room with as much work again.

Do you think people feel more comfortable looking at art in a pub venue than in a big white cube gallery?

We made a conscious decision when scouting for venues to use somewhere which isn't an exclusive arts venue. We want the show to be as accessible to as many people as possible.

Given that LeftLion is a major contributor to local culture but not an exclusively art-based organisation, we wanted to reach out to a non-art crowd and make the show accessible to people who would not normally visit a gallery.

Art is something which can have an effect on anybody and everybody, but is often seen as being pretentious or unfathomable, so anything we can do to de-mystify it and reach a wider audience has to be a good thing.

The work is on show at the Malt Cross until Saturday 14 March. A selection of prints will then be shown at the Golden Fleece from Friday 20 March to the end of April. There are also plans to make the show an annual fixture.