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A four-day celebration of art takes place in Bristol this weekend at the inaugural Bristol Art Weekender. The May Day bank holiday weekend has long been a key date on the city’s visual arts calendar, with Spike Island’s popular open studios attracting thousands of visitors each year. Yet this is the first time that Bristol’s leading institutions have collaborated on a city-wide event.
Led by public art agency Situations, the Weekender brings together 16 of the city’s visual arts venues, producers and artist-run initiatives to showcase the vitality and ambition of the local scene. With a plethora of exhibitions, installations, performances and events, four days of new and surprising encounters are promised.
The arrival of the event suggests that Bristol’s art scene is in rude health. Helen Legg, director of Spike Island, is enthusiastic: “Bristol benefits from a leading undergraduate course, more studio space than most regional cities, a small but healthy body of established artists, writers, curators and designers, and institutions that are increasingly working together to sustain and develop the arts ecology here.”
Axel Wieder, exhibitions curator at Arnolfini, agrees: “Bristol’s art scene is thriving. Younger artists, mostly recent graduates, find excellent conditions to develop their work in the city.” Indeed, Bristol is home to many artist-led initiatives.
However, as Wieder notes, there have been several losses in the recent past. Significant artist-led spaces such as Bristol Diving School and The Motorcycle Showroom have had to close their doors due to lack of funds. Even the long-established artists’ film and video agency Picture This was last year forced to close and merge with Spike Island after being dropped as one of Arts Council England’s national portfolio organisations.
Energy and urgency
Despite the recent economic challenges, the majority of Bristol’s larger institutions have ridden the storm and artist-led activity continues to flourish in Bristol. The transitory nature of spaces and funding actually seems to generate its own kind of energy and urgency among the city’s younger artists. However, this often comes at the expense of sustainable initiatives.
Much activity is driven by Spike Island’s Associates Programme, an informal postgraduate network for artists, writers and curators. “What’s unique to the Associates, besides providing professional development, is a ready network for artists new to the city to instantly plug in to,” says the programme’s coordinator Lucy Drane. “The links we have with other artist-led groups around the UK are also really valuable in helping members develop their own networks.”
For the Weekender, the Associates are presenting a group exhibition of work from selected members, a version of which also featured in this year’s Glasgow International. New projects provide reasons for graduates to stay in Bristol, but many of these are short-lived. “Opportunities for younger graduates are still very good in Bristol,” says Drane, “but I see a lack of support for emerging curators and producers, so we see this cycle of short pop-up projects that burn out quickly.”
An important artist-led initiative just keeping its head above water is Hand in Glove, who create development opportunities for artists at crucial stages in their careers. “We very much have to run things hand to mouth for our projects,” says co-director Leela Clarke. “We were recently turned down by ACE for a Grants for the Arts award, so our project for the Weekender is very much being produced on a shoestring.”
The group’s contribution, Surfacing, features new works by three emerging artists – Emma Ewan (Glasgow), Will Kendrick (Bristol) and Rebecca Ounstead (Nottingham) – which will be presented in unexpected spaces around Redcliffe Wharf, a derelict waterside location in the city centre.
Entrepreneurial spirit
Another promoter of emerging art is nomadic commercial gallery Antlers, who represent artists through temporary exhibitions, art fairs and a webstore. A tightly selected group show is planned for the Weekender, including work by Karin Krommes and Geoff Diego Litherland.
Working within a more traditional model is WORKS|PROJECTS, a commercial gallery operated by independent curator Simon Morrissey. Despite the market for contemporary art in Bristol being somewhat reluctant, Morrissey has not been dissuaded, programming a confident series of exhibitions over the last six years. During the Weekender, the gallery will be filled with the cartoon-esque sculptures of Richard Woods.
Another of Morrissey’s artists, Andy Holden, is staging his largest solo exhibition to date in Spike Island’s impressive gallery. MI!MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity) documents the contradictory artistic movement that Holden and his friends devised as adolescents, and comprises a large-scale installation incorporating video, music, painting, drawing, sculpture and text.
Despite running WORKS|PROJECTS as a commercial venture, Morrissey is also keen to help emerging artists. For instance, the Regional Interference programme supported five South West-based artists during 2013. “Historically there has been very little critically-engaged infrastructure in the English and Welsh regions,” he explains. “Regional Interference aimed to connect artists based in the South West with the market.”
For Morrissey, the key to the success of local groups and initiatives who have survived and even thrived in Bristol during the last few years is simple: “entrepreneurialism.” Claire Doherty, director of Situations, agrees: “Over the past two years we have witnessed a sea change in the city’s cultural ecology,” she says. “There’s an entrepreneurial spirit capturing the cultural institutions here now.”
The Bristol Art Weekender is certainly stirring up some excitement in the city and it is hoped that the event will galvanise the scene by helping to improve prospects for local artists. Other highlights include Jeremy Deller’s Venice Biennale presentation, English Magic, at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, British artists’ responses to the sea at the Royal West of England Academy, a tribute to the enigmatic Bristol-based record label Sarah Records at Arnolfini, and Annika Kahrs’ spellbinding installation of over 60 songbirds at the Lord Mayor’s Chapel.
The Weekender also sees the launch of the first Bristol Art Map, a quarterly listings guide to exhibitions and events across the city – a clear indication of the longterm ambitions that are driving this four-day event. “Bristol has become the place where you can do things differently,” says Doherty. “It’s somewhere you can test out new models of working, collaborate, reinvent how you communicate with your audiences and how you nurture new creative talent.”
Bristol Art Weekender, 2-5 May, various venues across Bristol. bristolartweekender.co.uk
