Louis Tuckman managed to squeeze in a visit to East Street Arts Open Studios during a very busy weekend in Leeds …
Before this weekend I’d never heard of the Open Studios concept. I like it. Visiting some of East Street Art’s studios in Leeds and meeting the artists that occupy them was a great opportunity. On Friday they had an opening party at Barkston House, a strange building about a half an hour walk towards the outskirts of Leeds.
We walked in and were instantly directed to a performance piece, where a woman looked like she was being possessed by a number of different characters as people stood by and watched onto the madness. I thought I recognised some of what she said from the weirdly brilliant cult film Harold and Maude, but I couldn’t quite tell. But here’s the great thing about open studios. After she’d finished with the line ‘Isn’t it brilliant when you can bring people together like this?’ before turning back to normality and everyone clapping, I got into a conversation with her about her work. She explained that it was completely improvised and brought together everything that influences her – people she meets, things she sees on TV, and yes films she watches like Harold and Maude. Where as I could have just been left confused, it was hard to deny the brilliant talent it must take to be able to improvise something like that so convincingly. I later found out that this artist is called Carrieanne Vivianette if anyone’s wondering.
I got into a conversation with someone else over a silver set of teeth someone had displayed. When you pressed a button, a little bubble came up out of oil underneath. God knows what that’s meant to represent, but the girl I was talking to said she preferred it when she didn’t understand the work, because then you can create your own interpretation of it. Maybe it would have ruined this work if the artist stood next to it describing how it relates to some philosophical insight by Nietzsche or something like that. Personally I don’t think I really liked it anyway.
The next day I visited Patrick Studio’s, which I preferred, as there were far less unattended studios and I think I’d like to have a studio space there, so it was good to snoop about. I didn’t intend to spend the full day at Patrick, but found myself really enjoying wandering from space to space being greeted by the artists and having discussions about their work. It’s a great way to see art. You see the work, they can explain it and if you don’t understand it you can ask any questions you want. They get to see how people respond to their work. You get to have a unique experience to understand what it is they do.
I was previously mesmerised by Ian Kirkpatrick’s irony in his psychedelically religious sculptural homages to materialism at Vantage art prize in Leeds. I had so many questions I wanted to ask him. I didn’t even know he had a studio space there so it was a great surprise to see him greet me into his studio space. He talked about how he managed to fit his art practice around his more commercial graphic design work that funded it. He talked about how his work has developed into what it is today. Also about his possible future plans to integrate what he does with package design in his art practice into a commercial practice. I’m sure he could do this without loosing any artistic integrity; I look forward to seeing what he does in future.
It was great to talk with Cherry Kino about her love of analogue filming techniques. Dean Kemp had some great things to say about how he managed to start an untrained artistic career just from a love of making things. I talked to Griet Bayaert about how her work has developed over the years from studying interior design, to creating glass works, to now focusing on her paintings. It was great to see Ashley Dean sat in his cluttered jungle of work he uses as a studio. I’d previously helped him out on a film he was making, so it was great to catch up and see how his work was coming along. I could mention loads more, but I’ll try refrain from rambling on so I’ll stop name-dropping now.
The open studios concept is great for me being a student so I can ask direct questions that are burning in my head. It’s great for anyone interested in art really. Or even people who aren’t, but would like to understand their reluctance.
A piece of advice that seemed to reoccur from all the artists was that If you have a clear enough idea of what you want to do, you will find a way to end up doing it. You can get by with little money; you just need to keep that belief in what it is you want to do. I can’t really tell whether that’s a naïve piece of advice that serves to inspire not just who’s listening but also themselves. It certainly is an uplifting thought though.
I wanted to catch the last day of Leeds No/Gloss film festival on the Sunday but I would have loved to have visited some of the other studios that where open to the public like Enjoy, Union 105 and In Situ. There just seems to be too much going on in Leeds at the moment to catch it all.
Although, one of the things that I saw at the film festival seemed to relate to what I’d learnt the day before at Open studios. It was something Willy Tea Taylor said in The Kingdom of Survival. He described the arts as ‘a beautiful chance to show somebody something they’ve never seen before.’ Cynics might disagree with that, saying that everything’s already been done before, but that’s such a crap statement. Art responds to new environments, creatives may use existing techniques and approaches but the outcomes can always be new and exciting. Open Studios was a great chance to understand them outcomes.