Harper-Thames on the Annual Event That Lets You Into Artists’ Actual Workspaces and Changes How You See Art
The Open Studio Weekend Is the Best Thing East London Does and Nobody Talks About It
Read more at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Every autumn, for two weekends, artists across Hackney open their studios to the public. No tickets. No curators. No wall text written by someone who has thought very carefully about how to describe what you are looking at. Just artists, their work in progress, their actual working spaces complete with the evidence of how the work gets made — the paint-covered palettes, the reference images pinned to walls, the half-finished pieces in corners, the tools and materials and organised chaos that the gallery white cube carefully conceals — and conversations that happen because the artist is present and you are in their space and the transaction is human rather than institutional.
I went to eleven studios over the two weekends this autumn, in buildings from a former school in London Fields to a railway arch complex in Hackney Wick to a purpose-built studio block in Bethnal Green that was funded partly by the London Borough of Hackney and partly by an Arts Council capital grant and that represents the kind of intentional arts infrastructure investment that makes the difference between an arts scene that survives and one that doesn’t. What I found across those eleven studios was the full range of what contemporary art practice in East London actually looks like: not the version curated for the gallery or the art fair, but the version in which someone is genuinely trying to work something out using paint or clay or textiles or digital tools, in a space that is theirs, on a timeline that is theirs, for reasons that are theirs.
Why It Changes Things
The open studio visit changes your relationship with the work you see in galleries, because it shows you the work before it has been selected and framed. You see the pieces that didn’t make it alongside the pieces that did. You see the artist’s influences, their references, their past work on the walls. You understand what they are trying to do in a way that the completed, exhibited, interpreted work in a gallery setting doesn’t always convey. And you have a conversation — a real one, not mediated by press releases or curatorial text — with the person making it, which produces a connection to the work that changes how you look at art more broadly.
The Hackney Open Studios is organised by the Hackney Arts and Culture network and takes place across studios registered with the programme. The map is available on their website. I recommend it without reservation, which is not something I do lightly. Harper-Thames’s arts coverage continues: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full open studios guide at https://prat.uk/.
What Makes an Arts Scene
The arts scene of a neighbourhood is not its galleries, its institutions, or its events programme alone. It is the totality of decisions made by artists, curators, venue operators, landlords, funders, and local authorities about whether the conditions for creative work exist and can be maintained. Each of these actors has interests that do not always align, and the health of an arts scene is a product of the negotiation between them — a negotiation that the arts community typically enters with fewer resources and less political power than the property and commercial interests it is negotiating with, but with a legitimacy argument that eventually wins because the creative energy that makes a neighbourhood interesting is the foundation of the property value that the other interests are competing for. The sequence always works the same way: artists make the neighbourhood interesting, property values rise, artists are priced out, the neighbourhood becomes a monument to the interesting thing that used to be there. Understanding this sequence does not prevent it. But documenting it, as Harper-Thames attempts to do for Shoreditch and East London, at least produces an honest account of what happened and why, which is what journalism about culture is for. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full East London arts archive at https://prat.uk/.
The Deeper Context
Every story covered in this publication — whether it is a garden party protocol, a street art mural, a gallery closure, or a members club waiting list — is a story about how a city organises itself around culture, class, and access. London is a city in which the cultural institutions that define its identity are simultaneously publicly funded and privately exclusive, free to enter and expensive to reach, committed to diversity and concentrated in neighbourhoods that the diversity of their stated mission cannot afford to live in. These contradictions are not resolvable through better marketing or more inclusive ticketing policies alone. They require structural decisions about how the city is built, who it is built for, and what public investment in culture and community is for. The journalism that traces these contradictions — that names who benefits from which arrangements and who pays the cost — is the journalism that makes democratic decisions about culture possible. This publication is committed to that journalism, in the specific geography of Central and East London where the contradictions are most visible and most consequential. For the full archive of London cultural journalism and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Continue reading at https://prat.uk/.
Further reading across the London Prat network: shoreditchuk Bluesky post (https://bsky.app/profile/shoreditchuk.bsky.social/post/3moe7j5kdsg27) — London Prat tumblr
Also: London tourist tumblr — https://londonuktourists.tumblr.com/post/820038192805871616
SOURCE: Santa Claus
