Gasworks announces the purchase, expansion and

development of its gallery, studios and participation space in London with a major  Arts Council

England pledge of £1 million.

Gasworks, a non-profit contemporary visual arts organisation based in London, has received a £1million commitment from Arts Council England towards the purchase and renovation of its building. This is the first of a two-stage process and launches a £1.8 million capital campaign to secure the future of the organisation. The capital development project will represent a significant investment in emerging artists and in the cultural life in the capital.

Gasworks provides studios for London-based artists and delivers a programme of international artists’ residencies, exhibitions and participatory activities. Gasworks is also the hub of the Triangle Network, a network of artists and art organisations in over 30 countries around the world.

Securing a sustainable future for Gasworks

The pledge from Arts Council England is a huge step towards realising Gasworks’ once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase and refurbish the building that has been its base for the last twenty years. The redevelopment will:

• Secure for the long-term one of the few art spaces in the Vauxhall area, where art is both made and experienced.
• Create a new fit-for-purpose participation space, to host community-led workshops for adults and children living in Gasworks’ vicinity.
• Build two additional studio spaces for artists, addressing the need for workspaces in South London at a time when major studio providers are closing their buildings.
• Enhance the ‘experience of art’ for visitors, providing a larger and more flexible exhibition space and creating better communal facilities.
• Improve the building’s environmental performance, upgrading the heating system and building insulation.

Need for the project

The redevelopment will secure and increase Gasworks artists’ studio provision, responding to a critical and identified need for centrally located, affordable facilities where artists can develop their practice. Securing Gasworks’ future aligns with the Mayor of London’s Cultural Strategy: Cultural Metropolis, which identifies the continuing pressure on artists from increasing rents on short-term studio space: “the temporary use of vacant buildings for artists’ workspace has dominated the provision of artists’ studios which perpetuates the trend for artists studios to kick start regeneration, but then become victims of it when prices rise”.

The timely purchase and refurbishment of Gasworks will safeguard the future of its provisions in an area of London undergoing extensive regeneration including the Vauxhall and Nine Elms’ redevelopment (with new landmarks such as The Tower, the new American Embassy, Embassy Gardens and the Albert Embankment regeneration project), and the creation of ‘Vauxhall One’ Business Improvement District (BID).

In developing the project Gasworks has carried out extensive consultation with artists, local residents, community leaders and local teachers. The London borough of Lambeth has endorsed the project by awarding a grant to support the development phase of the project. Read more Read the rest of this entry →

Emily Crane is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia. Her PhD focuses on the contemporary artist exchanges within the Triangle Network, with specific focus on Africa and South Asia and is entitled Navigating the void: The Triangle Network of artist-led initiatives. Crane has become a contributor to the Triangle blog. In this, her first blog post Crane shares her experience of looking through the archive of Triangle activity, currently housed at Gasworks, London, and discusses the nature of the archive more generally.

The infallibility of the archive has long been exposed to its more fragmentary and partial nature,  capable of being utilised, manipulated and distorted.  What is included and excluded is a political concern, and what constitutes an archive has been questioned.

With this in mind, it is almost impossible to conceive of what an archive of a network such as Triangle might look like. How can a multifaceted set of relationships across the world be represented in any single place, and how can the explosive creative activities that happen throughout the network be represented by administrative papers, photographs and booklets?

Considering these nonsensical questions, I have nevertheless been spending much time pouring through the archival boxes stored at Gasworks. Aware of the partiality of the stories such an archive might suggest to me, I continue to look with the addiction of a treasure hunter with my metal detector in hand. The boxes hold over twenty years of materials that have been accumulate through the London office: correspondences in the form of letters, cards, faded faxes and emails;  reports and meeting minutes; funding applications; newspaper clippings, gallery flyers, workshop catalogues, artist postcards; and the occasion sketch, artist publication, poster or workshop related remnant. Although much of the materials I have been considering are tied to specific logistical arrangements for workshops or studio buildings, there is a wealth of material collected that more generally pertains to events happening in many artworlds across the globe. Read the rest of this entry →