Category: News

Announcing a series of open studios across ASC studio sites, throughout summer and autumn 2024

In 2024 we are excited to welcome visitors into 6+ studio sites across London for a series of open studios.

Visitors can meet artists and makers across a range of disciplines, buy works directly, view an exhibition or project in the building, or simply see an artist at work in their studio.

As in past open studio events, many artists will be self-curating projects and exhibitions within their studio buildings to welcome and meet new audiences.

Open studios are free and we welcome all to attend!

See a full list of our upcoming open studios, or visit our Open Studios page to stay up to date on individual events.

ASC is pleased to share an opportunity for temporary free studio spaces dedicated to emerging artists and makers in central London. Based in Holborn, the studios would be available from March to October 2024, in the aim of supporting early career artists and makers who may otherwise have financial barriers to accessing a studio space.

ASC is a charity that provides affordable creative workspace across London, founded in 1995 by artists to support artists and makers in becoming self-sufficient in their practice.

Who are we looking for

We are seeking applications from early career artists and makers who are dedicated to developing an artistic practice or career but do not have the means to sustain a studio space.

Eligibility:

• Recent graduate (2021 onwards) from an arts course or degree; OR have no formal education but committed to developing an artistic practice 
• You do not currently have a studio, and finance has been a barrier to sustaining a studio in the past 3 years
• We are particularly interested in hearing from applicants from backgrounds that are underrepresented in creative fields
• We are particularly interested in hearing from applicants who are resident in or have ties to the local Camden borough

About the studios

• Up to 25 individual artist/maker studios in Georgian townhouse, varying sizes, most with natural light
• Available from mid-March to mid-October 2024 (up to 7 months), 7 days access with daytime hours
• Close to Holborn and Chancery Lane stations
• £150 refundable deposit* at the start of tenancy
• Free rent and services/utilities (including wifi, heating, electricity, water, security)
• Cycle storage in building
• Artists will receive priority for future studio spaces with ASC
• Access to a project space for creative and community activities
• Opportunity to take part in a final exhibition to conclude your tenancy

*Please indicate in your application if the deposit required would be a barrier to accessing the studio. ASC may be able to waive the deposit on a case by case basis.

Other key considerations:

• Disability access with a lift to all floors
• Not suitable for noisy, dusty or noxious practices
• No kilns in studios

How to apply

Click here to access our application form (Google Form).

Deadline: 5pm, Wednesday 6th March

Potential decision date: Tuesday 12th March [Edit: Please note this has been delayed until late March]

Potential move-in date: Thursday 14th March [Edit: Please note this has been delayed until late March]

This application is only available for individual artists and makers. If you are a group that is interested in a free studio, please see ‘More Information’ below.

More Information

If you would like more information about the studio spaces or selection process, or require an alternative application format, please contact lettings@ascstudios.co.uk or call 020 7274 7474. Please mention whether you would require an offline PDF format for the application, or a 10 minute phone call to be scheduled with ASC.

We are also keen to work with artist groups, collectives and creative communities who are established in or around Camden and London but may not have been able to access studio space due to financial constraints. 

There is an opportunity for ASC to offer larger studio spaces for this purpose. If you fit into this category, please contact lettings@ascstudios.co.uk with some more information about your group and why you would benefit from a free studio space. 

ASC announces our third free studio awardee in Ealing Road studios, Emily Moore.

Artists’ Studio Company is delighted to announce painting and textiles artist Emily Moore as the 2023-24 awardee of our free studio at ASC Ealing Road. Emily’s year-long free workspace residency began in October 2023.

Emily began her fine art practice following studies in graphic design, after which she completed an MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2020.

During this time Emily was awarded the Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Award, which gives one RCA student each year the opportunity to develop their practice with a studio space and additional support.

Emily is one of the founders and co-chair of RCA BLK, a grassroots community group that encourages and supports the practice of contemporary visual artists who identify as Black within the RCA’s wider community. 

After graduating during the Covid lockdown, Emily began experimenting with textiles, drawing together her fine art practice to create ‘crochet paintings’. Her work is inspired by everyday conversations and occurrences, using materials and a style of work traditionally associated with the domestic sphere and interjecting it within a canon of classical painting.

Emily says, “It’s so valuable to have this free studio space – not only for a sense of security and having the space to create, but also for the freedom to explore different avenues of my creative practice. 

I’m also really excited to be able to work at Ealing Road studios with the opportunity to engage with the borough I grew up in. Throughout the residency, I’ll be exploring how to connect with the local and creative communities in the area.”

The Ealing Road Free Studio scheme was developed in partnership with Brent Council, allowing an artist who is resident in the borough access to a free studio space, as well as the opportunity to exhibit at ASC’s Canalside Gallery. Emily was selected from a number of applications by a panel with representatives from ASC and Brent Council.

The previous artist in residence at Ealing Road studios was Warren Reilly, a painting, textiles and social design artist born and raised in Brent. Warren achieved an MA Textiles in Practice from Manchester School of Art before returning to London, where he continued his practice, working with Brent’s London Borough of Culture campaign as creative director for ‘Fashioning Our History’ and  curating The Mixed Museum’s digital exhibition ‘By The Cut of Their Cloth’. You can watch our interview with Warren during his end-of-residency exhibition here.

ASC is a leading charitable provider of affordable workspaces for artists and makers in London, supporting thousands of creatives since it was established in 1995.

Ahead of The Handbag Factory’s official launch in November 2023, the ASC main office has moved to its new creative coworking venue and event space.

The Handbag Factory is a new affordable coworking venue based in Vauxhall which promises a unique workspace for professionals and practitioners in and around the creative industries.

The space, managed by Artists Studio Company (ASC), includes over 60 coworking desks, along with a meeting room, refurbished event hire space, and a permanent public art gallery. Doors first opened on 5th October, with a launch evening planned on Thursday 23rd November that will showcase the venue, introduce ASC and The Handbag Factory to the local creative community and welcome individuals and organisations working in arts and culture. 

In the lead-up to its opening, ASC has completed an office move to the new location from our previous headquarters at The Chaplin Centre, Thurlow Street. 

You can now find the ASC team at The Handbag Factory, 3 Loughborough Street, London SE11 5RB with office opening hours from 10 – 5pm.

Performance artist Philip Ewe initiates his new not-for-profit live art platform with ‘The Legal Stage I’ at ASC Cleaver Street, Kennington

In January ASC Cleaver Street hosted ‘The Legal Stage’, the first event from the new not-for-profit live art platform initiated by performance artist Philip Ewe responding to the former Lambeth County Courthouses at ASC’s Courthouse Project Space.

The event presented a subversive programme of live work from artists Liv Fontaine, William Joys, Bernard Walsh, Deniz Ünal and Philip Ewe himself to a full audience.

In an arts landscape that is struggling with funding cuts and a political landscape of fraudulant rhethoric The Legal Stage responded to its judicial setting with risky, ephemeral and traditionally un-commercial live work whilst keeping the event open to all. It is supported by ASC as host, building on our charitable mission to support artists and educate the public in the arts.

Bernard Walsh, reading ‘Is this a dagger? A case for why Art is not a subject that should be taught?’ at The Legal Stage, London, UK (2022). Photo: © Tom Hall / The Legal Stage

William Joys, live performance at The Legal Stage, London, UK (2022). Photo: © Tom Hall / The Legal Stage

Philip Ewe, live performance at The Legal Stage, London, UK (2022). Photo: © Tom Hall / The Legal Stage

Deniz Ünal, live performance at The Legal Stage, London, UK (2022). Photo: © Tom Hall / The Legal Stage

Liv Fontaine, live performance at The Legal Stage, London, UK (2022). Photo: © Tom Hall / The Legal Stage

About the event

‘The Legal Stage’ is not-for-profit artist led live programme in the former Lambeth County Courthouse in Kennington, London. In an arts landscape that is struggling with funding cuts and amid a cost of living crisis we’ve instigated an ethical artist-led framework without any funding. Based in risky, ephemeral and traditionally un-commercial live work whilst keeping the event open to all.
https://www.thelegalstage.com/
https://www.instagram.com/the.legal.stage/

Artist Hanaa Malallah (ASC Grafton Road) has recently been featured in ArtForum’s article UNVANQUISHED: Amin Alsaden on Iraq’s art under two decades of occupation, in their March 2023 issue.

Hanaa has recently completed an exhibition at The Cube, ASC Grafton Road’s project space, with her work filmed and featured by BBC Arabic.

You can find out more about Hanaa Malallah at her website.

A SPLATTERING of black, white, and red binds a mass of darkly clothed brown bodies. Media outlets relish such portrayals of protesters carrying Iraqi flags in the rallies that erupt regularly in Baghdad, indicative of the strife that has beset Iraq in recent years. The images are understandably appealing: They possess a sense of drama, even an epic quality; perhaps those scenes also resonate with a disgruntled world numbed by pervasive injustices. In the same photographs, a colossal structure often appears, one not dissimilar to the demonstrators’ signs, rising above the crowds: the July 14th Monument, colloquially known as the Tahrir or Liberty Monument, a friezelike bronze-and-travertine structure more than 160 feet long, by artist Jewad Selim (1920–1961) and architect Rifat Chadirji (1926–2020).

[…]

Few artists have captured the decimation of Iraqi life by the American-led invasion and by previous conflicts as consistently as Hanaa Malallah (b. 1958), who observed the wrecking of her country in one war after another until she finally left three years into the occupation. Also a close associate of Al Said’s, Malallah has created an extensive body of work predicated on the notion of incineration. She has routinely burned her materials, and has weathered, aged, and distressed her canvases, with the aim of suggesting a general state of decay, of omnipresent death. Shroud IV, 2012, is more like a compressed wall-mounted sculpture than a painting; its dense surface resembles a landscape that has been ruined by a blazing fire. There is an underlying order, a grid of sorts, that modulates the unwieldy pouches of scorched and twisted canvas. Inside the folded fabric, and strewn in between, are little lumps of soil, seeds, small twigs, fragments of amulets, and even parts of taxidermied birds that seem to have been embalmed for some impenetrable burial ritual. This piece speaks to the indiscriminate fury of war, but I also see it as connoting the senseless erosion of the organically and painstakingly built artistic culture of Iraq—a deterioration that Malallah, as a participant in and beneficiary of that culture, witnessed.

Full article available on ArtForum.

Throughout January 2023, ASC Gallery will host the Slade Postgraduate mid-year show. The event offers MA/MFA Painting students in their final year the opportunity to exhibit work ahead of their degree show.

This will be the fourth time that ASC has hosted a mid-year show with the Slade, providing students a space to develop their practice in off-site projects. 

In 2018, the first link between ASC Studios and UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art was established with ‘The Field’. This exhibition featured 22 first-year MA Painting students and was initiated by ex-ASC Studios artist Sarah Tew. This relationship continued in 2019 with ‘Pulling Teeth’, also featuring first-year Fine Art MA students.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, this link was reestablished in 2022 with an adjusted focus on final-year students across the mixed MA/MFA Fine Art in ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’. This year, we are delighted to again welcome 18 final-year Slade students to ASC with their exhibition, ‘Slide a Glance’.

Darren O’Brien, Exhibitions Director at ASC, says:

“Since 2018, ASC has been happy to host the Slade MA Painting students in ASC Gallery’s January opening show. It has worked well giving young artists a chance to curate and show in a professional setting, get a taste of what post college life is like, and push their work forwards and upwards.”

‘Slide a Glance’ will commence with a private view on Friday 13th January, 6-9pm, at the ASC Gallery. It continues until Monday 27th January with opening hours on weekdays from 10am – 5pm.

We would like to share our thanks to Slade Painting tutor Lisa Milroy for her enthusiasm in starting the relationship between ASC Studios and Slade School of Fine Art back in 2018.

Image from Slade MA show at ASC Gallery, January 2022, ‘Why Don’t You Dance’

As our exchange with Berlin’s HilbertRaum continues with an exhibition at the ASC Gallery, we reflect on a series of ASC Hilbert projects over the past year.

ASC Hilbert is a collaborative series connecting London’s ASC Studios and Gallery with Berlin’s HilbertRaum. More than just a series of shows, ASC Hilbert is a surface of contact for the art communities of the two cities spanning the course of several years. 

The aim of this long term collaboration is to not only introduce exciting fresh art to a new audience, but also help facilitate lasting connections between art professionals in the two cities, and thus support the development of early and mid-career artists. To contribute to this aim, ASC Hilbert has begun its international exchange with a series of events across both venues in 2022.

In April 2022, the first exhibition – titled A Faint Ground – kicked off the project in Berlin at the  HilbertRaum gallery. ASC artists Karolina Albricht and Darren O’Brien travelled to Berlin and exhibited with German artists Heike Kelter, Hannah Rath and Betinna Weiss.

“Recently I was trying to remember the feeling of fresh grass under bare feet. The sensation of the grass between my toes, its delicate and earthy feeling, cool and green. To some degree looking at artworks can be like the feeling of fresh grass under bare feet. Eyes register the artwork as a whole, taking it in, searching for links, but then sense the surface, its unique detail, its thread, its pitch. With our eyes we walk the faint ground like our feet feel the fresh grass. In this age of uncertainty what is certain is the ground beneath us.” – Darren O’Brien, ASC Gallery

A Faint Ground, May 2022, HilbertRaum

Also shown at HilbertRaum was Naked Flames, an exhibition in August that presented a dialogue of disciplines in “a world where everything flows and nothing is still”.

Artists from ASC Brixton Studios – Georgios Mavridis, Ania Tomaszewska- Nelson, and Timothy Haccius – travelled from London to Berlin with their artwork to exhibit. The Berlin artists who featured in the exhibition were Jurgen Grewe, Mirka Raito, Hildergard Skowasch and Isabelle Fein.

Naked Flames, August 2022, HilbertRaum

The return leg of this ongoing project, ‘We Were Made in the Dark’, exhibited at ASC Gallery from late October to early November. The event received funding from Finnish organisation Frame Finland and aims to shift focus from the negatives of a post-Brexit landscape and foster pan-European connections that give opportunities to artists, and vice versa.

Berlin-based Finnish artist Niina Lehtonen Braun came to London with her art performance group, Jokaklubi, to show a new series of drawings and to take part in Jokaklubi’s ‘The Theory Show’ performance. Alongside this, Harriet Hill performed and exhibited one of her wearable sculptures. ASC artists Laura Wormell and Adam Hennessey showed new paintings and drawings.

Jokaklubi performance, We Were Made in the Dark, October 2022, ASC Gallery

ASC looks forward to continuing this exchange with HilbertRaum, and we are excited to see future iterations of events and cross-collaboration between artists through this project.