I have just finished the latest issue of MAT ZINE.
This issue makes up part of my response to the residency and will form part of the work for the art walk show at Westgate Studios at the end of this month.
In this issue I have tried to address the idea of empty properties being regenerated as studios both in Westgate and Durham.
There is only positive to be had from the use of empty properties as centres of art practice: maintaining empty buildings, bridges built with local communities and of course providing low rent and viable spaces for a variety of arts practitioners.
At the beginning of the residency I was thinking in terms of taps, and a net work of flowing creativity through these spaces.
This issue of MAT ZINE is more political in content that I had 1st planned; there are political contexts surrounding the emergence of art practices in empty properties and I found I couldn’t not refer in part to those issues, especially as much of the work I was documenting at Empty Shop Studios in Durham contained a direct political content.
