Preview: Artspace’s 40th Anniversary

This fascinating archival display traces the history of Artspace, the artists’ collective that later became Spike Island.
Artspace was founded in the mid-1970s by a group of painters, sculptors and printmakers who sought out and administered affordable studio spaces for artists in Bristol. For this display, photographs, letters and posters from the Artspace archive (now housed at the Bristol Record Office) are presented alongside a new film produced to celebrate this pioneering artists’ collective.
Here’s exhibition curator Elisa Kay and filmmaker Kypros Kyprianou to tell us more.

Tell us about the exhibition, and what story you hope to tell about Artspace.
Elisa: This exhibition tells how a group of artists came together to find a shared work space, pooling their resources to buy equipment and materials. The exhibition covers the period from 1974, when Artspace formed and occupied the McArthur’s warehouse, to around 1998 when they moved into the current building (a former Brooke Bond tea packing factory) and became Spike Island.
The photographs, leaflets, posters and documents tell us something of how artists make their living; what they do day-to day; what an artists’ studio looks like; and the tools artists need to make their work. Highlights include the fantastic posters produced from the late 1980s onwards, when Artspace organised regular fundraising gigs to help secure their new permanent home at Spike Island from 1996.

You’ve also made a film of the Artspace story. Tell us more…
Kyprios: My film includes interviews with founding members of Artspace and key individuals who helped to secure the current building. What emerges is a picture of sustained effort, passed baton-style by many different people working voluntarily to create space for artistic production. 

What sort of sense of Artspace’s journey do you get from the archive?
E: Artspace’s home at McArthur’s was under threat for a long time and they were lobbying, searching and fundraising for a new home for eight long years. They gained a huge amount of public support – a petition with 12,000 signatories – as well as support from the Council, companies and benefactors. The operation they ran at McArthur’s, and subsequently at Spike Island, is one of the biggest artists’ studio complexes in Europe.

K: I was most struck by the chance occurrences that had a huge impact on the project. For instance, artists John O Connor and Louise Barber turned their house into a gallery, and an elderly couple came to look round. They talked together about what Artspace wanted to achieve.
Soon after, an unconditional £100,000 cheque came through the post. This kind of capital funding for an artist-led project was unheard of at the time, and came just as they were under imminent threat of leaving McArthur’s. Backing like this gave them the confidence to push forward to find a new home.

What was the previous history of the McArthur’s warehouse?
E: It was a malt house. When the artists moved in, the building was still owned by McArthur Steel and Metal, but they’d started letting out space to other tenants. Next door was a coal depot, now disused. The docks were quite depressed, having closed to commercial shipping in 1975, and it wasn’t the bustling area of culture and museums that it is now.
Initially, Artspace moved in to studios on the top floor – but they soon colonised other areas of the site with their Sculpture Shed and Printmakers studio. Other tenants included the Bristol Theatre Workshop and Bristol Filmmakers Cooperative – some members of which were later instrumental in the founding of Watershed.

How would you sum up Artspace’s impact?
E: Artists from Artspace did a lot of work outside their studios, working on projects with schools, hospitals, play schemes, and prisoners at Leyhill Prison. They organised exchanges with Bristol’s twin towns Bordeaux, Tbilisi, Oporto, and brought the results back to Bristol. There was an exhibition of 40 artists who took part in a Bristol/Hanover exchange in the vast V-Shed on the waterfront – the biggest exhibition Bristol had ever seen!
The legacy of these artists’ hard work has benefited hundreds more who have had studios, exhibitions, and residencies at Artspace and Spike Island. It’s exciting to read the letters, meeting minutes and the business plans: you can see what is possible to achieve with just exceptional human resources.

The exhibition “reveals the wider socio-political situation in which Artspace was founded”. Tell us more? 
E: This story offers an early example of the impact that artists can have on cities. Artspace and Arnolfini were the first cultural organisations to start to populate the area in the mid-1970s after the docks closed. They had a huge impact on the area then and its regeneration since. This pattern still emerges today – artists move into neglected areas because of cheap rents, the area becomes busy, interesting, the streets are busier and thus safer, and then developers snap up the properties, trading on the ‘cool’ of the artists’ studios and galleries.
Artists are forced out by the rising rents and the cycle starts again elsewhere in the city. That’s why Artspace were spot-on in raising the money to buy a building. It was hard work, but we are still here!

Artspace’s 40th Anniversary Apr 30-June 19, Spike Island. For more info, visit www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/exhibitions/artspaces-40th-anniversary
Top pic: Artspace’s petition to Bristol City Council, 1990. Pic: Spike Island Artspace