I took early retirement from my former employment in 2001, in order to devote myself full-time to art. Very shortly after that I became involved in the South Square art centre, and participated in the activities of the Unit 9 group, based there, when it was founded a few years later. In short, I’ve been engaged in art for a few years now. I discovered today, however, that it really is never too late to learn something new.
Several members of the Unit 9 group travelled to Dewsbury today to meet over lunch with some of the members of the Redbrick group, based there. It was very interesting to meet and share experiences with another collection of artists. The lessons of the visit will take some time to digest, I’m sure, and I have not yet had the opportunity to compare notes with colleagues from Unit 9. My impression, however, is that there is a very important contrast between the ways in which the two groups operate. Putting my experience in a nutshell, I would say that we run a cooperative gallery, whereas they run a cooperative studio. That’s a very important difference, and there is no likelihood that we would want to dismantle what we do as a result of this learning process.* That is not to say, however, that we have nothing to learn from the comparison.
The thing which impressed me most about our colleagues in Dewsbury was their openness and communication with each other about their working processes. This requires, I’m sure, a good deal of mutual trust, which I find impressive. This is something which I believe we could address and work on in Unit 9. It will be a couple of weeks yet before we meet as a group again, and have the opportunity to compare notes. I will be very interested indeed to see whether we have returned from our trip to Dewsbury with a shared sense of purpose about what we might learn from the trip. Certainly we will have plenty to talk about.
*There is no way, for example, in which I would ever want to work in a collective studio.