Fire Station Work/Live

Eligibility: See below.

Next programme (2015-2020): Applications will be accepted in 2014. Full application details will be available on this website.

Information

Acme's work/live programme at the Fire Station is one of the most directly supportive schemes for artists in the United Kingdom, providing combined studio and living space at low rents as well as special bursaries: rent free space and grants of £5,000/year, worth over £30,000.

The former fire station was bought in 1997 and converted with funding from the National Lottery and other sources. Restored and developed to provide 12 purpose-designed work/live and six non-residential studios, these units were developed in response to the lack of affordable space for artists to work and live in, and in particular, to the lack of studios properly accessible to disabled artists.

The fixed-term residency scheme is intended to allow artists more time to concentrate on the development of their work and professional careers, and less time working to survive.

Programme 4 (2010-2015)

Over 100 artists applied for Programme 4. A selection panel of artist and educator Cath Hawes, artist Gayle Chong Kwan and Acme's Chief Executive Jonathan Harvey selected the following 12 artists:

Briony Anderson
Briony lives and works in London, being previously based in the north-east of Scotland. Her practice ranges from studio-based work to collaborative projects, often seeking a reinvestigation of the cultural significance of landscape. Current work responds to 18th and 19th century portraiture, but only to its backgrounds (backdrops of landscape). The resulting paintings are limited solely to the landscape elements of each full image - studying the act of looking rather than direct observation.

Briony will continue to develop research around the idea of the landscape as sustaining certain elements of its traditional ideological significance while working on a series of paintings for exhibitions in 2010/11 as well as developing collaborative projects.

Gemma Anderson
Gemma's practice combines research, drawing and printmaking.  She is currently working on a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, exploring the history of psychiatric ideas, natural history collections and divinatory sciences.

Gemma graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007 and has since been artist in residence in Japan, France and Ireland. Recent Exhibitions include “An Experiment in Collaboration”, Jerwood Space, London, “Drawing Ezo” Sapporo, Japan and “Isolated”, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Kate Aktin
Kate makes sculpture and drawings from basic materials... white paper, pencils, rough building board and found objects. The drawings feature grotesqueries and the large and small-scale sculptures often lean against something. She is interested in objects which she sees as representing more than one thing.

Jonathan Baldock
Jonathan works with sculpture, installation and painting. Often utilising traditional home-craft methods. He deploys a myriad of techniques from knitting, weaving, and home economics all antagonising the perceptual reading of the work as his assemblage of objects and image are often drawn from high art or classical antiquity. In the past he has used sour dough to replace clay or stone, and demonstrates a keen interest in costume and fakery with his inclusion of false eyelashes, glass eyes and elaborate wigs. Baldock continues to perplex the viewer with these strange arcane correlations, dematerialising the work into socially scathing comments or ironic tensions between the choice of material and subject matter.

In 2010 Jonathan Baldock will have a solo show at Cell Projects, London. He is currently exhibiting in ‘Newspeak’ at The Hemitage Museum, St Peterburg which will tour to The Saatchi Gallery later this year.

George Charman
George completed his (BA) at University of Creative Arts, Farnham (2002-05), and his (MA) at Royal College of Art, London (2006-08). He has won prizes for his practice including the Tim Mara print prize, the Helen Chadwick travel prize, Royal Academy British Institute Award and most recently, 2nd prize at the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

In 2008 George won a commission from the architectural firm MAKE to produce artwork relating to St Paul’s Information Centre. He has lectured at the University of East London (2008), London Metropolitan (2009), and is currently a sessional tutor on (BA) Fine Art at the University for the Creative Art, Farnham.

Melanie Clifford
Melanie works in translation between film, sound, drawing, broadcast, material and site to think about psychological relationships to urban space: intimacy, distance, estrangement; the experience of being held in and between registers.

Her work includes constructing visual scores for variable sound interpretation, soliciting sensitivity to detail, to minor fluctuations and structural disintegrity. She also works directly with sound and its location: performing site-specific sound pieces and recording found sounds and her own slight interventions, to be edited, reconstructed and broadcast. She is particularly interested in the complex interaction of this work with existing, fluctuating environments; consequent unpredictability; collaboration and the irreducibility of individual perspective; connection and its absence.

Her work is exhibited and broadcast internationally, and she co-produces a weekly live improvisational radio test transmission for Resonance 104.4FM, London. During her residency she will be seeking collaborations with people who share an interest in perception and peripherality.

Susan Corke
Susan is a printmaker with a developing interest in making more three dimensional work. Recently she has begun to use drawing and printmaking to create installations and interventions which explore narrative space. In the last couple of years she has also travelled and worked in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands.

“The Acme residency is a chance for me to consolidate and build on these experiences. The space and time it represents is a chance to scale up and really experiment.” 

Robin Footitt
Robin is a recent Painting graduate of Royal College of Art - coordinating ‘Through the Wall’ at A Foundation, Rochelle School, June 2009 in Shoreditch. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions both in the UK and internationally including USA, Denmark, Germany and Italy. His work was selected for the Outset Art Acquisition Fund in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery and Tate for the RCA Collection in 2009. Footitt recently completed studio residencies with the Florence Trust, London (2009/10), Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2008), and was the recipient of British Airways Great Britons Award.

“Recent paintings have introduced a dialogue whereby narrative links and elliptical resonances enter in and out of responses to subject matter and material. My time at Acme will allow me to focus primarily on developing out of these key themes and expand a practice which has come to include architectural forms, drawings and methods of display.”

Haroon Mirza
In his work Haroon Mirza attempts to isolate the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music and explores the possibility of the visual and acoustic as one singular aesthetic form. These ideas are examined through the production of assemblages and sculptural installations made from furniture, household electronics, found or constructed video footage and existing artworks combined to generate audio compositions. The subject matter of his work pivots around socio-cultural systems such as religious faith or club culture and their relationship to music.

A subtext to his practice is an interest in the spillage of sound from artworks within group exhibitions. This interest is explored both through a curatorial concern and within his own works. Mirza includes existing works by other artists in his installations in the same way he works with other (ready-made) material. This is typically to play a part in forming a larger (musical) composition.

Matthew Noel-Tod
Matthew works primarily in moving image. His films and installations explore identity, technology and politics of representation, often using the aesthetics of fashion and popular culture framed by conceptual art strategies.

Recent works and exhibitions include ‘End Again Week (Pop-Up!)’ at The Two Jonnys’ Project Space, London (2009), ‘Blind Carbon Copy’ (2008) at Picture This, Bristol and ICA, London; ‘Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors’ (2006) at Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Whitechapel Project Space, London and Cambridge Film Festival, and ‘Nausea’ (2005) at London Film Festival, EMAF, Osnabrück and Rotterdam Film Festival.

Matthew studied film and fine art at The Slade School of Fine Art, Norwich School of Art and Design and Goldsmiths, University of London.

David Osbaldston
“My interests lie in the space between fact and fiction in such a way that embraces drawing as the centre of an activity which often employs obsolete materials and processes. From the everyday ubiquity of a photocopied document, graphic communication, printmaking, collage, the artists' book, installation, and black and white photography. I am interested in questioning the codes and conventions that frame our understanding of the present in relation to the legacies held within it.”

Emma Smith
Emma has a site-specific and social practice that is both research and production based. Using organised events, constructed occurrences, instigated encounters, performance, sound and drawing she explores the art of everyday life, investigating human engagement with space and in particular the psychological impact of space on human understanding and behaviour.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths in 2003 Smith has worked on residencies, commissions and exhibitions in the UK and internationally including: Camden Arts Centre 2005-2006, Whitechapel Gallery 2006-2008, Gasworks Triangle Trust International Fellowship to Mauritius, 2009, and research trips with the British Council to China and India 2009. Smith is an active voice in arts education working as consultant and artist educator for most London contemporary art spaces and sitting on the council of engage (National Association of Gallery Education).

Programme 3 (2005 - 2010)

Programme 3 offered nine five-year work/live residencies at low rents to Kate Broad, Lisa Cheung, Maggie Hills, Robert Holyhead, Lizzie Hughes, Riccardo Iacono, Samson Kambalu, Damien Roach and Jack Southern.

Two bursaries of £5,000 per year plus free work/live space for two and a half years were awarded to Ming Wong and Ben Cove, whose bursary was open to disabled artists.

Ming Wong completed his residency in September 2007 and moved to Berlin to take up a one-year Kunstlerhaus Bethanien residency. This provided an opportunity for Acme to offer a shorter residency, again through open submission, from May 2008 to the end of the current programme in February 2010. The new residency was awarded to Briony Anderson who works across a range of media.

Programme 2 (2001 - 2005)

Programme 2, which began in April 2001, awarded four year work/live residencies to: John Askew, Sonia Baka, Stephen Conning, Stevie Deas, Elizabeth LeMoine, Gordon McKenna, Pat Naldi, Hayley Newman, Stuart Parkinson, Tim Sanderson, Erika Tan and Aaron Williamson. Gordon McKenna was awarded a bursary for a disabled artist.

During Programme 2, four artists were able to realise opportunities elsewhere and their places on the residency scheme were taken up by Paul Harrison, Laurence Harvey, Kevin Heavey and Jack Southern.

Programme 1 (1997 - 2001)

In 1997, 12 artists were selected from a national submission to take up the first three year residencies: Edward Allington, Helena Ben-Zenou, Gillian Blease, Paul Burwell, Martin Creed, Permindar Kaur, Kypros Kyprianou, Marty St. James, Lindsay Seers, Virgil Tracy, Barbara Tyrrell and Joanna Woodward. Noel Paine took up the final year of Virgil Tracy's residency. Three bursaries, including one for a disabled  artist, were awarded to Paul Burwell, Barbara Tyrrell and Joanna Woodward.

The Fire Station Project: History

In December 1997, The Fire Station Project opened in a former London County Council Fire Brigade Station in London's East End. It was the product of many years of planning by Acme to create the first permanent, fully accessible, low-cost, combined working and living spaces for professional fine artists in the UK. Twelve artists, selected from a national submission, moved into the building and so began the first three year residency programme.

Acme's principal role is to support artists and their career development by providing studio space at low cost to maximise the time they can devote to their work. The programme at the Fire Station extends this support by providing studios which include living space at low rents, given that there are many artists in London who cannot afford working space in addition to somewhere to live.

The work/live programme provides breathing space, allowing artists to concentrate on the development of their work by greatly reducing or removing other practical and economic pressures.

A central element of the project is to ensure that this fundamental and practical form of support is accessible to disabled and non-disabled artists. The building has been converted so that it is fully accessible to wheelchairs users and we are committed to making further adaptations to support artists with a wide range of access requirements.

Each programme has offered at least one bursary assisted place to a disabled artist. Our commitment to access continues to develop as an important and integral feature of the Fire Station's support for artists in future years.

The building, originally purchased by Acme in 1996, was located is an 'employment zone'. This meant that the local authority, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, wanted to encourage employment use and did not want to see the building being used solely for residential purposes. Acme's proposal to develop work/live space, with the studio at the heart of each of the units and the living space incidental to it, achieved planning consent because we could guarantee that the use of the building as genuine workspace would be maintained. This is in contrast to many, so-called live/work projects which often drift into purely residential use.

The original 12 firemen's flats on the upper four storeys of the Fire Station have been converted to 12 work/live units - simple, open, self-contained spaces (averaging 550 sq.ft. / 51 sq.m) including ancillary kitchens and bathrooms. The ground floor has been converted to six large non-residential studio spaces let to artists registered on Acme's studio list. The building proved to be ideally suited to its new purpose; very few structural alterations were necessary and the new lift was accommodated within one of the original practice towers at the rear of the building.

The Fire Station project was supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of England, The Foundation for Sport and the Arts, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis Gyr, The Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust, London Arts Board and the Arts Council of England.

As part of our lottery project we invited Station House Opera to create a new large scale performance, Snakes and Ladders, which used the whole rear elevation of the building as a four-storey stage set. Performed over six evenings, the first performance followed the formal opening of the Fire Station and celebrated Acme's first 25 years.

In addition, we commissioned William Raban to make a half-hour film, Firestation, which focussed on the history of the building and its transformation to artists' studios. Artist John Riddy was also invited to make a photographic record of this process of transformation.