It’s basically done being painted now, though, and just waiting for a few coats of varnish.

Maker Studio is devoted to crafts, making & selling useful beautiful things; to removing as many barriers as possible; to helping emerging makers into the public eye.

It’s early days yet, but we’re working towards moving into an empty shop and setting up a physical studio & gallery.

Not all of these are pendants – I’m experimenting with a new design of choker as well, with page fragments laminated onto ribbon. Still haven’t had them properly tested yet, though, so I won’t be putting them into proper production for a while. Always need more testers…

These are what I’ve been working on over the last week or two – they’re made entirely of paper & glue, painted & varnished. The handmade original (below) was sitting around for a few months, while I kept picking it up and thinking “must do an improved version of this”, and then shortly after that I got access to a working laser cutter again. This is ten teardrop-shaped petals, a small central circle, and a more or less key-shaped back piece – the loop is integral, bent back on itself & glued in place.

Here’s another version, in malachite because I’m still not quite up to tackling proper York, Lancaster, or Tudor roses. The design still needs more work – something about the shape of the petals, mostly – and I’m still trying to sort out an efficient way to deal with the assembly process.

Since a lot of you won’t be familiar with the empty shops movement, here’s a short executive summary. There are a lot of disused commercial & retail spaces in the UK, and that’s only set to increase. There are also a great many creative people who don’t have, and can’t get, the capital & guaranteed income stream to make use of them at market rents. (Not to mention: the requirement for that sort of income stream rules out a lot of really good & innovative uses for these sites which just wouldn’t generate enough to pay a market rent, business rates, and running costs.) There are some legal & organisational tools which remove a lot of the barriers, both for landlords and for tenants.

The day opened, of course, with a bit of coffee & networking. As Eva said, artists hate that word but can’t stop doing it. When you reframe it as just chatting to each other about your practice & experiences, swapping useful contacts & tips for getting things done, artists look at you oddly and start wondering whether there are really people who don’t do that instinctively.

Abigail Cheverst, manager of Slack Space, opened the day with a discussion of what it is we do when we take the arts into empty shops, and why, and how. Almost none of these notes are verbatim, and they may get a bit cryptic sometimes. Anything in italics is my own editorial comment; everything else is the speaker’s. If I’ve got something wrong, or left something out, please do comment!

Empty shop work is a response to recession, and is very specifically against waste. There’s a lot of unused resources out there, and there’s always more creative talent looking for outlets. Successful projects almost always arise out of a very local passion.

It’s important to leverage a full range of networks (working with educational groups, health groups, local councils, creative communities, local community groups, national & regional groups, &c.), and to consider creativity in its widest sense, actively avoiding exclusion. [Abby is speaking here specifically from Slack Space's point of view, explaining their very successful practice, but I think it generalises well.]

Having a strong brand & recognisable design aesthetic, consistently applied, is vital.

What we can offer, more than anything else, is a truly accessible space. There are a lot of people who’d never consider going into a gallery or a museum, but they’ll happily walk into an odd-looking shop on the High Street without thinking twice, to see what’s going on and if it’s interesting. Equally, the transient & temporary nature of empty shop work allows us to design disabled accessibility into our projects from the get-go.

As far as marketing goes, we tend to use a lot of social media, partly because it’s cheap and partly because the kind of people who join in these sorts of things are almost all on social media too. (That doesn’t mean to say we don’t want, and can’t get, others – just that it’s an easy win to get that demographic in.)

It’s important to develop a structured programme of volunteering, because you do basically need someone there all the time – someone to open up, someone to keep an eye on the art, someone to make the tea, someone to enthuse about everything & show visitors around. Given that, it’s important to give back to volunteers too – we can offer professional development, contacts, skills, and personal development. Quite a few of the volunteers at Slack Space had gone on to get paid work in the arts sector on the back of that, and one had since founded her own gallery. [Later, we heard some lovely testimonies from artists & workshop leaders who'd been voluntering at Slack Space, on how much it had meant to them and how much confidence & ability they'd discovered in themselves.]

In order to Do Things, you need to be an organization with legal status, but there are a lot of ways to do that: charities, companies limited by guarantee, community interest companies, industrial & provident societies, associations. [I'm reminded of One Click Orgs, a lightweight and effective tool for building associations.] All of them have their pros & cons, and they’re suitable for different purposes & scopes.

If your organisation isn’t a charity itself, try & associate with one – it gives quite a few benefits, including an automatic 80% rate relief. Slack Space is “fostered by” Firstsite – that is, Firstsite provided advice, business mentoring, and some monetary help, and signed their legal agreements (eg. the lease on each shop) when Slack Space couldn’t.

We benefit landlords in several ways, not just vice versa. We take on the liability for rates, which they’ll be paying while the shop stands empty; we relieve them of the need for maintenance & security; we improve the shop & the local area, increasing footfall and helping to attract a tenant when we move out; and we give them good PR.

When contacting landlords, doing it directly is often good, because agents are usually on commission, and when we offer to pay £0.00 as rent that means their commission is £0.00 too, and they’re rarely enthusiastic about that sort of thing. Look for socially responsible landlords (the Slack Space site is owned by the Co-Op) and network with local charities, particularly the “clubbable people” type like the Lions Club, Rotary Club, and so on. Local councils can be helpful, too.

Contact your local rates dept to negotiate. There’s an automatic 80% reduction for charities [which may also count for nonprofits & social enterprises] and the rates dept do have discretionary powers to reduce the rates further but in these recessionary days that’s very unlikely. There are a lot of local variations in policies.

When dealing with the health & safety side of things (absolutely and utterly vital) hse.gov.uk is really useful & easy to read.

If you’re planning on offering music, dance, &c. be aware that those are “regulated entertainment” and must be licensed. [This is due to change, because the Licensing Act is being amended. Most music at least will no longer be regulated. Note also that morris dancing and similar activities are explicitly exempted from regulation. You can dance the morris anywhere.] If you don’t want to serve alcohol, the license is a lot cheaper & easier to get; if you do want to serve alcohol, you can get a Temporary Event Notice or ask a friendly publican to run an outside bar. [Which can be inside - it's just that it's outside its "home" licensed premises.] If you’re going to play or distribute recorded music, you need a PRS (Performing Rights Society) license; Slack Space pays £40/year for theirs.

Michaela Freeman then talked about Artside, and curating in the public space. One of the problems she faced, during her time curating art in shop windows & public spaces in Southend-on-Sea, was in explaining the nature of art installations to the venues. Apparently, when you tell them you want to put art in their windows, they expect you to turn up with wooden easels and pretty pictures to put on them, not plinths, 3D art, conceptual pieces, and abstracts.

Working with & around shopfittings is important. All shops have their own arrangement of fixing points, paintwork that mustn’t be scratched, posters that need to stay in the windows, and so on. Venue buy-in & engagement is really important, and not just from the “being invited back” point of view – there are a million & one things recalcitrant managers or staff can do to minimize or subvert the impact of the art, even once you get past the “is this piece of art going to harm our business or make a political statement we don’t like?” problem. [Another eternal artistic issue: censorship vs access. But there's usually somewhere else to put the politically important work, and something else - or something political in another direction - to put in the sensitive space.] It’s also important not to alienate the public, eg. by doing anything too weird or conceptual – but they’re generally smarter and more interested than they’re popularly given credit for.

You have to be able to explain the advantages to the shops: things like positive PR, increased footfall, extra eyeballs.

In Southend, they were able to use the beach as a vast public space – for instance, Natasha Vicars’ piece Flowers for the Sea, where she gave away flowers at a stall on the beach, inviting people to take them down to the water’s edge, make a wish, and throw them in.

Amy McKenny, from TAP in Southend, opened with a beautiful quotation.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places, where other people see nothing. — Camille Pissarro

She talked about her own experience setting up & running the gallery, in a gorgeous-looking building owned by a water company, and showed a lot of rather lovely-looking and ambitious art projects in the space.

“At what point does gathering become a community?”
“If you build it, they will come.”

When you’re writing a funding application, use the language that makes you passionate. Give details, name names. Adapt the wording to the funder you’re talking to, but remember the passion, the reason you do it. It’s always worth contacting them first, rather than making an application cold and opening the conversation that way. Ideally, you’ll end up in a good ongoing relationship with runding bodies – that’s the best outcome for them, as well as for you.

TAP has been moving away from a formal this-exhibition-then-that-one setup towards a Hub-style co-working, floating, transient model.

(In response to a question from the floor about income streams) Diversity is important – run a cafe, sell prints if you’re somewhere where people buy them (they do in London, but not in Southend), rent out studios to artists, &c.

Something that came up in a lot of sessions was the central idea of failure. One of the most important aspects of the empty shops movement, to most of the speakers, was the idea of being allowed to fail, of trying things and learning from them, and then trying something else. Effort, engagement, activity, is an end in itself.

Kayte Judge, from We Are Bedford, presented a detailed case study of her work in a struggling retail estate. Bedford has been a pretty economically depressed area for a long time [it certainly was when I was at university nearby in 2002] and she took over seven empty retail units. By the time the project finished, all seven had gone to thriving commercial tenants.

One of the advantages of empty shops work is that we can define this as a roaring success – we’re not planning on being there forever, and a win for the community is a win for us. We’re birch trees, a typical pioneer species that colonises scrubland, and gradually gets ousted by oaks as a mature woodland ecosystem develops.

Kayte talked about “slack resource” (things you can use and re-use) and “slack time” (as in “when are you not using the space? – OK, we can do something then”), emphasising again the way empty shops work fits into liminal spaces and metaphorical corners, the gaps between “traditional” or “official” activities in the public sphere. Another thing she said was that you need a “busking mentality”, the right-let’s-get-out-there-and-give-it-a-try, get-your-game-face-on attitude, to get things going. This was the session I found most helpful myself, but it’s hard to convey that here – mostly, it was from the inspiring and detailed examples, and the “it worked – everyone wins” nature of the project itself.

The last talk before lunch was from Chris Clarke, another Slack Space stalwart, who talked about some of their history & events, all of which had evolved from volunteers’ efforts – lots of crafts workshops, a regular folk club, art exhibitions, a spectacular fundraising day for the tragedy in Japan – and gave a few more useful tips for Getting Stuff Done. When you’re approaching firms, try and deal with their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) people. Local family firms are almost always keener on helping out, and more engaged with the project, than chains or franchises. Stay flexible, and remember your getout period – always keep in the back of your head “how long would it take us to get all of this out of here?”

Eddie Bridgeman, from the Meanwhile Project, gave us a lot of nuts-and-bolts details of how his organisation operates, how to find & approach landlords (try large property companies, not asset management companies, and remember that agents have a legal obligation to pass on any offer, even £0.00, to the owner), get permissions for what you want to do (be polite, clear, & upfront – this is pretty good advice generally, in fact) & drive local engagement with your project. (One example he gave was a tailor who ended up using photographs of local people for his publicity, which of course brought them & their families in to see everything.)

After the property’s been occupied for six weeks (less one day), the owner gets a rates holiday if it stands empty, so we do them good even after we move out.

Eddie also explained his “three Cs” model: Credibility (network, reassure people you know what you’re doing, have a track record available, get yourself known, prepare a detailed background for other people to see), Collaboration (let other people do what they’re good at, and help them with what you’re good at; find experts when you need them), and Clarity (communicate clearly, make the full truth available, tell people what you want when, make sure everyone involved knows what you want and what you’re going to do).

The meanwhile lease is a recognised legal document, explicitly exempting the tenancy from the provisions of the 1954 Landlord & Tenant Act (less faff for everyone there) and allowing for use without rent until the property finds a permanent tenant. The benefits of having a standard lease for this sort of use are immense.

My notes from Andrew Cribb‘s talk (3space) are much more sparse, partly because I was running out of paper by then! All I have is that he notes a tendency towards exhibition-only uses (ie. a habit amongst arts people to think “aha, a nice space, we shall exhibit some art in it”) and wanted to emphasize that there are a vast number of diverse activities to go in there, such as youth groups, charity HQs, social project offices, and so on and on.

At the closing plenary, someone made a link with alternative/complementary currencies, and there was a short discussion on their strengths (locality, community-building) vs their failure modes (lack of fluidity, can’t pay the rent, tendency to be taken over by crystalwavers). Abigail Cheverst also talked about what was effectively a gift economy at Slack Space, and having noticed that the people who could afford to contribute least at pay-what-you-can events were usually the ones who stayed behind to move chairs afterwards.

Another thing that came up a lot was that this is all wonderfully local & regional. The East of England area has a vast amount of dynamism & creative talent, more apparently than other regions. There’s still quite a fear that rural artists & makers are getting left behind, though – someone raised the example of the Dengie. Essex has always been very village-centric in its cultural life, and even the smallest are still pretty vibrant places, but it’s nevertheless hard for people to see everything centred in the largest towns.

A few more links to close, to other projects & organisations I heard about on the day – they’re all worth looking up.

• CoastNet

• Seasider
• Gatehouse Arts in Harlow
• Stew in Norwich
• Off the Rails in Wivenhoe
• Set Exchange (Freecycle for theatre people)

“Liberals think the poor need jobs, when really the poor need to not need jobs: but land, skills & tools to provide their own necessities.”

(via)

It’s attractive on the face of it (who doesn’t want a cottage, a garden, a pig, and a workshop?), but when unpacked a bit gets incredibly problematic. First up, we have “Liberals think”—that’s a red flag right there. It’s a polarizing political argument, and it’s an Americanized one, fairly uncritically buying into the Liberal/Conservative dichotomy consensus.

Second, we have someone telling us what “the poor” really need, and in specific opposition to what [X other non-poor group] think they need. If you need me to explain why that’s a bad thing, please leave your name & postal address in the comments.

Now, as for “jobs” balanced against “land, skills & tools to provide their own necessities”—really, this is comparing apples to porridge oats and telling us we can only have one of them. [Editorial note: I'm going to be using "us" fairly freely in this post, because I'm both one of the first-world-poor and one of the privileged trying to find solutions. I'm deliberately not talking about the global poor, because I don't have any personal experience there.]

When I was grumbling about this on Twitter, Farah Mendlesohn summed it up: “The history of the world can be written as people trying to escape the land.”

Land is important, there’s no way to contest that. It’s almost the only place food comes from, and it’s pretty much the only form of capital you can immediately put to work and make some sort of subsistence from. On the other hand, not all land is created equal; all land requires specialist knowledge to profit from; all land requires near-constant hard physical work; and most of it is in really inconvenient locations. In addition, all land requires external inputs for sustainability: not only does your first batch of seed have to come from somewhere, but simple mathematics mean that no matter how religiously you compost you’ll need to add in some fertilizer too, to compensate for all the delicious tasty biomass you’re extracting from it. For that matter, where did your garden fork come from, and what about the next one when it breaks? We can do more than we think on a smallholding, but we can’t do everything, especially in the crucial first two years. (NB: I’m talking about arable farming here, and there’s a great deal of marginal land that isn’t suitable for that, but pastoral farming has almost all the same problems, with a larger initial investment and a longer gap between profit phases.)

So therefore, nobody will ever be free of the cash economy, and we don’t want to be—we installed it for a reason, and that reason is because it gets us useful stuff. It’s nice to think that we’ll be able to make enough money selling crops at the farmer’s market, but that’s difficult enough as it is with few-enough people trying to do it that it achieves niche-market/specialty-product status. It wouldn’t be able to compete with supermarkets. We all have crafts & hobbies that are potentially slightly monetizable, but as for fitting those in around subsistence farming… no.

In addition, land is one of the most inflexible forms of capital there is. Most of it is only fit for a few particular purposes (even discounting planning laws) and at least in the UK all of it is difficult to sell to someone who isn’t going to cover it in concrete & incomers.

So, yes: people have always wanted to escape the land, to get someone else to do the work of primary resource extraction and leverage economies of scale, whilst they get on with providing other services and having fun adventures. Which isn’t to say that farming can’t be fun… if you’re young & not disabled, or if you’re sitting pretty managing a floating workforce of young people to go out in the rain before dawn for you or shovel three hundredweight of shite. (And yes, I’ve done those, and more.)

There’s a flipside, though, which is that a particular class of people have always wanted to keep other, poorer people on the land. This isn’t just to ensure that the food (and timber, and wool, and coal, and so forth) supply keeps coming; it’s to keep society quiet, too. A more mobile society is a more informed, more restless, less deferential society—especially because mobility tends towards cities, and towards either skilled trades or crime. (Cf. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down.)

So one way to translate the original quotation would be something like this.

“The poor shouldn’t aspire to flexible lives or portfolio careers—smallholding and subsistence farming is good enough for them. I couldn’t do it myself, of course.”

Another, more generous way would be something like this.

Everyone should have access both to employment and to resources, and to the training & support they need to make the most of each. Nobody should be barred from either, or forced to remain in either.

That sounds idealistic, but it’s not; doing that would be pragmatically good for everyone. Encouraging fluidity means that the market will signal more efficiently, and fulfilling the hierarchy of needs removes a lot of the drag and friction from economic life.

I’d been wondering where this was for a month or so, and it turned out it had been in an inner pocket of my belt pouch all along, with the leather cord wrapped around it. The continual pressure (and probably the warmth) has pulled off a little of the paint, but that’s all. I’m fairly encouraged, overall!

This is seasoned holly, cut from a tree in my garden a few months back when a branch was threatening the elder across the way. I need a new short-bladed carving knife with a full-sized handle, so this is the first step towards that. For the blade, I’m going to use a dismounted Opinel No. 2.

These are always popular, but painting curves on the satin ribbon is awkward enough that I have terrible trouble getting around to finishing them off. One’s spoken for already, but the other will be up for sale when it’s done.

Like the Twelfth Night jewellery I made, these are cut from an old and much-used play script. They’re going to be quite a lot more ornate, though, using the text more as a background than a main feature, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they turn out.

This is another one taken from a digital photo, this time of a tree in the middle of Chesham in Buckinghamshire. (You can see the original, in full colour, below – as usual, click through to Flickr for the full version.) I loved the contrast of the dark branches, the bright fairy-lights, and the multitudinous blues of the sky so much, I had to work on it and turn it into something completely different.

I’m not planning on carving this one, but I shall be selling digital prints when I get everything set up. Watch this space!