What is a studio, anyway?

What is a Studio, Anyway? brings together artists, curators, designers, educators and arts professionals across the UK and further afield to share, question and contemplate the idea of the artist’s studio and the role of Higher Education in shaping it.

This new publication collates conversations, interviews and musings on the artists' studio, featuring contributions from Amelia Hawk, Andy Harper, Ben Sanderson, Eugenia Popesco, Georgia Gendall, Jane Darke, Joanne Masding, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Jordan Verdes, Leila Galloway, Maria Lalić, Marisol Malatesta, Professor Teal Triggs, Sarah Taylor-Silverwood, Simón Granell, Shen Xin, Stella Kajombo, Tarek Lakhrissi.

The project began in early 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when access to studio spaces for fine art students was prohibited. As researchers Professor Susan Orr and Dr Alison Shreeve have argued, the studio is central to fine art pedagogy, enabling an expanded means of knowledge production - rather than being, ‘delivered,’ it is, ‘forged’ (Orr and Shreeve, 2018:3) between students and educators. Successive lockdowns significantly disrupted the norm of studio-based practice which has underpinned Fine Art higher education in the UK for many decades. However, as artist and lecturer Kate McLeod has acknowledged, the lack of access to the studio during this time ‘created opportunities to experiment with different approaches, and to gain an appreciation of some of the limitations of the studio’ (McLeod, 2022).

One such limitation is the affordability and accessibility of artist studios post-education. Recent research published by ACME studios has found that long-term, secure and affordable artists’ studios are increasingly rare (Acme Studios, 2022:6) and therefore many artists are working outside of, or without a traditional artist’s studio space. These combined factors led us to initiate What is a Studio, Anway? with the central aim of offering students alternative insights, ideas and models, which would expand, challenge and disrupt dominant perceptions and representations of the artists’ studio (both within and beyond higher education).

We invited practitioners with a broad range of professional experiences to contribute to our research – from recent BA Fine Art graduates to established artists at the peak of their career. The research follows a qualitative narrative-based enquiry, and participants were asked four key questions:

What do you consider to be a studio?

Has this changed in the past year?

Across your career, have there been points where you have not had a physical space to work, and how have you navigated this?

What piece of advice would you give about studio practice?

What distinguishes our project from existing studies and research is the breadth of contributors and its specific response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The book sits in contrast to recent large scale survey publications, such as The Artist's Studio: A Century of the Artist's Studio 1920–2020 (Blazwick, 2022), which featured critically acclaimed artists; those often far removed from the experience of an emerging graduate or student – our intended audience.

This project offers a unique insight and contribution to the field of alternative ways of conceptualising and re-imagining the artist’s studio. The publication was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Grant from UCL, 2022.