As September ended, Katie Goodwin and I took some people around Bermondsey on a South London Art Map Last Fridays tour. Living in South-East London, I was already familiar with the SLAM. I’ve explored most of the Peckham and Deptford routes, although I’ve never been on a tour before, so it was kind of new territory for me.
Although we only had a couple of days notice, it was enough time to familiarise ourselves with the route, the galleries, and some of the artists’ work that we would encounter. Although we did get slightly lost looking for one gallery on our recon mission before the tour, we made it to the meeting point on time.
The tour began with CGP in Southwark Park, with an exhibition called One and One and One curated by Outside Architecture. Once everyone had a few minutes to look at the exhibition, Mary McClean, one of the artists from Outside Architecture gave a talk about the show. This talk was particularly relevant to my practice as it touched on topics that I have researched in the past, but have not thought about for a while such as temporality. They then went on to talk about incompleteness, and ruins, so incompleteness after completeness and raised the question ‘what does it mean to be incomplete?’ There is a sense of feeling awkward the when faced with something that is unfinished, and this can also can apply to open space in terms of architecture. This left me thinking about how I use empty space in my work.
Relating to One and One and One was Lost Properties at the Coleman Project Space. The space is used by artists that have been invited to make new work. Disorientating shadows and slightly awkward architectural responsive work was the order of the day here. It had a homely feel, which added to the sense of disorientation.
After a brief stop at the Vibe Gallery, we headed around the corner to V22 for the Young London 2012 exhibition. This was probably the real gem in the tour and blew the minds of some of the tour goers. I’d never been there before either, so I was instantly amazed at the scale of the space. The exhibition was set in a vast corridor space and two massive gallery spaces. Although architecturally similar, these were way more impressive than the Tate Tanks. The highlight for me was work by Rochelle Fry, small bronze works with a fragility and sense of miniature monument that really struck a chord with my recent studio experiments . The visit to V22 concluded with a performance, Lecture Apathy by Toby Huddlestone.
Things started to turn slightly pub-crawl-like as we headed to Westlane South for Bottled in Bermondsey, a show celebrating the galleries first full year programme. This featured specially brewed, limited edition beer!
The final leg of the tour was Horatio JR, a gallery that used to be a pub called the Lord Nelson, I’d visited here recently. The space works well as a gallery, with a series of rooms used to display work, on this occasion paintings by Stuart Cliff. After asking for directions from a passer by (my fault for taking a slight wrong turn) the baffled pub goer tried to get us to go to ‘The Ship’ as that pub was open. He didn’t believe us when we said the The Lord Nelson had re-opened as a gallery.
Overall, it was a really enjoyable evening. Although we’d never taken people on a tour before, it seemed to go down really well. As well as introducing others to new spaces, I discovered a few myself, and also got some extremely useful information and ideas for my own practice.
Through the conversations that I had with the tour goers, they took the opportunity to go on the tour so that they could discover new places, and go to galleries and project spaces that they would otherwise would not know existed. It’s also much nicer, and perhaps easier to go to gallery openings as part of a group, especially when attending private views and late night openings, as these can sometimes be a bit daunting, I think that is where the real benefit of these SLAM tours lies.
