Cell Project Space: Building a Creative Community from the Ground Up
In over 15 years in operation, Cell Project Space has found a sustainable business model for an artist-led community and artist working space, building a thriving community of emerging artists with an exhibitions programme focused on urgent current developments in the visual arts. They are one of the oldest organizations of their kind in London, but with 7 sites (and 900 artists) and growing they have even more to look forward to. I caught up with Richard for an interview.
How did Cell Space begin?
Cell ‘began’ in 1999. I was renting part of a shared studio with another artist, in a floor above a carpenters workshop in Dalston. The workshop was an outbuilding of a huge Victorian factory type building.
The carpenter’s business declined a bit (I think Carlsberg Special Brew was partly to blame) and he wanted to shed the responsibility of collecting the rent from the floor above where we worked — this meant one of us needed to take on the lease or all lose the studio’s. I drew the ’short straw’ and took on the task of collecting the rent from the others and paying the landlord, a Caribbean gent who sometimes wore a bullet proof vest, etc — i never asked why, but don’t think it was anything to do with collecting the rent…
A few months later, an entire 7000 sq ft floor came up in a wing of the main building; I had, for a number of reasons, been really keen to make an experimental platform for showing artists I was interested in, and place my work amongst them. But I didn’t want to do it alone and this is where co-founder of Cell Project Space, artist, friend, mentor and lecturing colleague, Milika Muritu, came in — I was ready to take the risk on renting the whole floor in the somewhat terrifying hope we would be able to build studios and rent them to artists to fund exhibitions in a section we would save to function as the project space, but I really needed a comrade, confidante and counter opinion.
In addition, Milika turned out, as a sculptor, to be able to work like a builder alongside me. We carried six hundred 8x4 boards up six flights of stairs to build those studios. My arms are two inches longer than they should be after subsequent years of studio build board carrying, and i suspect my headstone will be a slab of 8 x 4 granite when i go…but it was fundamental to our creating the organisation, as there was certainly no money to pay builders at that stage.
There was no business plan — it was really an artist survival strategy, and maybe to bring the game to our own doorstep through the project space.
The large building we partially occupied in Tyssen Street, off Dalston Lane in Dalston, was Victorian and very dilapidated. Our wing had huge windows so made lovely studios. Other floors were occupied by Pentacostal churches, a monthly ‘rave’ and other dubious ‘businesses’, not to mention large numbers of Hackneys iconic four legged long tailed mascot — the poison immune Hackney super-rat.
The studios we built generated enough surplus income beyond the rental and utilities costs to cover the cost of a studio each for Milika and myself and a 400 sq ft ‘project space’. The future at the Tyssen Street premises never looked especially secure, with a sketchy lease, and ‘landlord’ being bundled off by the police one day, and we realised we needed to spread across more than one site / lease in order to secure longer term security and stability. After a couple of years we had leased a second site in Arcola Street, Dalston, and built more studios and moved our project space there.
How did you come up with the name Cell Space?
Some research indicated that the building had been originally built as a hospital / medical institution and rumour was that ours had at one time been the padded cell wing for the medically insane.
The word ‘cell’ is ambiguous and multi-faceted and felt, despite being a little grim in certain contexts, to fit a hive of artists studios and activity. So, ‘Cell Project Space’, it was.
Cell has managed to run smoothly for 15 years as an independent artists initiative, with freedom from government funding. How has that freedom affected the exhibitions programme?
Firstly, i think ‘run smoothly for 15 years’ would be misleading; the first 6 or 7 were pretty tough going, though it probably didn’t look like that from the outside, but behind the scenes there were a lot of growing pains.
In the early naughties when there were still very few exhibiting opportunities for early career artists in London. Many of our first projects were group presentations, involving well established artists alongside younger or lesser known practitioners — the strategy being to attract visitors through the door who might be curious to see a museum grade artist exhibiting in a small project space in East London, and in the process generating interest for a newer generation. The process proved useful in terms of establishing Cell across several generations of artists, from well established mid career artists to recent graduates.
What really holds the programme together is when we started offering artists their first solo exhibition in the UK, many often completely unknown to UK audiences. As a result this moved Cell Project Space’s identity and direction more towards an emergent platform. We have now established an international reputation for initiating innovative forums for contemporary art and produced some important solo commissions for artists at a pivotal point in their career.
Looking back 10 or more years through our archive (in our website) a pattern emerges of having shown young artists as they emerged from their Post Graduate study, who are now successful in an international arena; Goshka Macuga, Richard Hughes, Mick Peter, Emily Wardhill, Toby Zeigler, Rachel Reupke, Haroon Mirza, Benedict Drew, Jessica Warboys, Eddie Peake, and Yuri Pattison to name just a few.
The point being that freedom to take risks, encourage artists to experiment, sometimes outside the constraints of their existing practice, without the shackles of the need for sales or demands of funding criteria has allowed us to nurture and develop a more reflective and coherent vision for our programme, enabling us to respond to artists’ needs but to react to urgent cultural themes.
This vision is protected through the funding stream our studios allow. To this day Cell remains a self funding and sustainable model of an artists initiative, independent of external funding needs, and unbound by the curatorial constraints of commercial gallery sales. A huge amount of work goes in to the studios side of the organisation (with around 900 artists and creative industries in our current 7 sites, and much more in the pipe line) in order to nurture and protect the purity and innocence of the exhibitions programme.
Could you talk a little bit about your current efforts to maintain affordable working spaces in Hackney Wick?
I have been contributing to the design and development for the workspace element with the developer on a scheme which just had planning approval granted in Wallis Road, Hackney Wick with Cell being geared towards occupying the workspace element within the development, and I have been very involved with the design and costing which have been included within the consent to develop — it looks to be a workable model within planning which creative industries may benefit from across boroughs.
In this instance, Cell’s lease has expired and we have no legal rights to retain a lease on the premises, but the LLDC have encouraged the developer (and other developers working on schemes in the area) to create at least the equivalent affordable workspace for artists and commercial creative industries as part of their ‘area masterplan’, which we see as of huge importance and significance for the areas creative and residential community.
The point being that progressive councils and the GLA are talking and listening to organisations like Cell, the Arts Council, the National Federation of Artists Studio Providers amongst others, and deploying it through planning policy. Developers, although having their arms twisted through policy, and maybe initially reluctant to play ball, are starting to see the increase in value to the lucrative residential part of their projects as a result of the workspace element being occupied by creatives, thus attracting potential residential buyers to the development.
How do you feel about the current state of property development in London?
There cannot be many places on the planet with a newly formed ‘council’ for a new ‘town within a town’ with powers to grant planning consent for building development, and has a master plan for the entire area within a capital city with a creative workspace and residential well-being mission.
There is a real sense of optimism about the Olympic legacy and Cell welcomes it to the extent that we are seriously considering moving our offices, exhibition space and operation into the redeveloped Wallis Road site in several years. We have been designing and developing the exhibition space and offices for Wallis Road with architects for the entire scheme, Pollard Thomas Edwards; it offers purpose built increased split level gallery space with better access very close to what will soon be Hackney Wick’s redesigned station. All of the workspace will offer infinitely better thermal retention, ventilation, internet speeds, build quality etc, but also, and very importantly, cost the artists using the studios no more than they are paying in rent at this moment.
Winning the Olympic bid certainly meant development in East London went into overdrive, which was a nail in coffin for low rent workspaces in the area occupied by artists. It is heartening to see the LLDC working hard to safeguard this creative community and even bring displaced artists back in.
It is increasingly difficult to find leasehold buildings to convert into artists studios in east London, with boundaries of affordability pushing ever outwards, though this is a pattern of gentrification in growing cities across the planet — the only way to combat being pushed out is to secure long term roots through purchase of freehold premises which involves massive capital investment — Cell is on the brink of its first freehold purchase, but it has taken a long time to reach this position and it is easy to see how it may feel unattainable for younger studio providers to buy a building in London.
And finally, advice you would give to other artists who are interested in starting their own initiatives?
You need to have a chunk of money to start with first of all, if you don’t seek external funding. Otherwise you need to just take that risk. We happened to find a business model to make it work, but certainly when we started out there wasn’t much encouragement.
