21st Anniversary Rogue Open Studios

For my arts event, I chose to visit the open showing of Rogue Artists' Studios at Crusader Mill, a mill complex behind Piccadilly Station in Manchester, the largest artists' studio community in the UK outside of London (being home to 90+ contemporary artists.) The Open Studios offered members of the public the chance to see for themselves the works of art produced within the creative spaces they were developed in and to meet some of Manchester's most exciting emerging and established artists.

Spanning all forms of visual art from painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance and more, visitors were welcomed to the two-day event when the artists threw open their doors over the weekend of 15-16th October 2016 to celebrate the final open studio at Crusader Mill.

The event was spread over four floors and I spent a couple of hours peeking through the rooms, some of which had been turned into more traditional exhibition spaces and others had been left in their natural messy state, with the artists taking up residence in their studios throughout the day to chat with members of the public about their work.

Here are photos of the Rogue Open Studios flyer.

Whilst wandering through the building, I could see evidence of a passion for movies, aligning with my own interests, on the wall decorations of the studios, including posters of 'The Shining' and 'Black Swan', a cutout of a newspaper article on Lauren Bacall, an ominous list of "Notable Club and Cinema Fires of the past Thirty-Five Years", and a curious printout hanging in one of the rooms of a litany entitled "The Film Prayer" (which, upon further digging, turned out to be an actual cautionary tale for projectionists and a mythical document from the analogue days found in film cans – its author is unknown). I also took an interest in the books on their shelfs, as I tried to glean some insight into the concepts and ideas fuelling their work.

I came across an abundance of visual art in whatever form you could think of to conjure, from sparse headshots of famous figures, many paintings composed of elements which seemingly had no relation to each other including landscapes, concepts and satirical messages, depictions of British seaside cuisine, a model of the underside of a ship, copper figurines of the athletic form performing what could've been a pirouette or more likely the shotput, rooms cluttered to the brim with paintings stacked side-by-side across floors, tables and walls, sketches of the larger female body, collages of a woman with tribal markings on her face, film shorts projected across the columns which held up the creaking building, experiments with typography and abstract symbolssplashed across walls and an empty ramshackle cinema situated on the third floor looping experimental shorts, all situated within one of the last remaining untouched cotton mills in Manchester (which is to be restored and renovated following its sale to a Manchester-based developer.)

I hadn't encountered a space quite like Rogue Artists' Studios before, and it was interesting to see how a diverse collective of artists can coalesce and work alongside each other, providing (affordable) space for them to experiment and exchange ideas, and also to nurture an environment of creative sustainability. Rogue Studios presented a vastly varied cacophony of pieces representing the artist's struggles to express and portray their experiences of life, their philosophy, ideology, moral framework, concepts, hopes, dreams, nightmares and so on. Such a concentration within one space meant I couldn't help but skim through much of what was on display, only scratching the surface and not considering the deeper meanings and possible interpretations of many of the pieces.

All told I enjoyed this experience, and would definitely recommend to others for the rich variety of artistic endeavours on display.