The Gallery as Studio
For almost twenty-five years I worked at The Byam Shaw School of Art, progressing from janitor to Caretaker, to Buildings Manager, to Studio Manager and finally Gallery Manager. Alongside those changing roles I gradually developed a teaching project that became one of the defining parts of my working life.
The gallery was never treated as a showcase for finished work.
It was a laboratory.
Each Monday a new group of second-year students arrived. I deliberately composed each group from across the disciplines. Painters worked alongside filmmakers, performance artists with sculptors, photographers with installation artists. Because I knew every student personally and understood how they worked, I could construct groups whose differences were as important as their similarities.
The students were not allowed simply to install work from their studios. Instead they brought ideas, sketches, research, experiments, failures, materials and unfinished thoughts. Together we searched for unexpected connections. Sometimes two students discovered they were exploring similar questions through entirely different media. Sometimes they realised they shared materials while pursuing completely unrelated ideas.
The task was not to exhibit.
The task was to discover.
Throughout the week they transformed the gallery into a temporary research space, responding not only to one another’s ideas but to the architecture itself—the walls, the light, the proportions, the history of the building and the possibilities of the space.
In effect, I tried to remove the certainty of the studio. Students who felt secure within one medium suddenly found themselves thinking through another. Collaboration replaced authorship, experimentation replaced completion and process became more important than product.
On Thursday afternoons the work stopped.
Critique began.
The students who had made the work were asked to remain silent while everyone else discussed what they thought they had seen. Only after every interpretation had been voiced were the makers invited to speak. Rather than defending intentions, they were asked a different question:
“Having heard all of this, does any of it help you understand your own work differently?”
The emphasis shifted from explanation to listening.
On Thursday evenings the discussion continued informally over a student bar that we opened in the lecture theatre. Performances often took place, films were projected and conversations carried on long after formal teaching had ended.
Friday belonged to dismantling everything.
By Monday morning another entirely different group would begin again.
The programme was designed exclusively for second-year students. First years were still finding their feet; third years needed to concentrate on their degree exhibitions. The second year offered a rare opportunity to destabilise habits before they became fixed.
The project received several teaching awards and became an established part of the school’s culture.
When Central Saint Martins took over the institution, the programme was one of the first things to disappear.
That was the moment I realised my own time there was probably coming to an end.
One thing I hadn’t appreciated until much later was just how unusual my education at Leeds Polytechnic had been. The weekly seminars chaired by T.J. Clark, with Terry Atkinson, Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, Jeff Nuttall and Jeff Teasdale arguing with one another, had become my normal. I assumed every serious art school worked like that.
There was a three-year gap between graduating from Leeds and beginning my MA at the Byam Shaw School of Art. When I arrived, I was surprised to discover that nothing remotely similar existed. There were only half a dozen of us on the MA, and the kind of rigorous collective reading and debate I had taken for granted simply wasn’t there.
So I started it myself.
Each week I would choose a text, circulate copies, and invite anyone interested to meet and discuss it. There was no official status, no tutor involvement, no assessment. It was simply a seminar because I thought there ought to be one.
Most people drifted in and out.
One student, however, came every week.
His name was Yinka Shonibare.
A few years later, after I had graduated and returned to the Byam Shaw as caretaker, the school had moved to its new building in Archway. Yinka was then in his third year. When I quietly established the student gallery in the central corridor, he and Brad Lahore became the first two artists to exhibit there.
Looking back, there is a pleasing continuity to it. Before there was a gallery, there had been a seminar. Before there was a teaching programme, there had been an informal reading group. In each case the pattern was the same: if the structure I thought an art school needed didn’t exist, I simply tried to build it. The seminar group I had organised during my MA years unexpectedly echoed several years later.
By then I was working at the Byam Shaw, developing the gallery programme. One of the artists I invited back was Yinka Shonibare. At the time he was working in the arts—if memory serves, with an organisation such as Battersea Arts Centre or Riverside Studios—while continuing to develop his own practice. That was precisely why I wanted him to return. Students often imagined that life after art school was an all-or-nothing choice between immediate success and giving up altogether. Yinka demonstrated another possibility: earning a living while steadily building an artistic practice.
The exhibition became his first solo show.
It also completed a small circle. A few years earlier he had been the student who faithfully attended the informal seminar group I had organised during my MA. Now he returned as an exhibiting artist, showing the next generation that artistic careers are rarely linear and almost never arrive fully formed.
As the years passed, Yinka’s career expanded internationally and he became one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists. Our paths occasionally crossed, although inevitably life moved in different directions.