Artist Studio Project

What if your bedroom was an artists studio?

What if the tools and materials you needed to make art were all sourced from your kitchen?

What if under your bed was a museum?

Rhona Warwick Paterson

For over four years I worked with Platform, exploring different approaches to socially engaged practice and developing my own way of working within fine art, craft and design. I worked with adults, children and young people through the Taking Part programme and specifically the Art Factory, Nu Gen and Saturday Art Club groups.

Artist Studio was a project that ran at Platform from September 2020 - July 2021. I wanted to design a project that explored ‘working from home’ following lockdown and the ongoing impact of Covid-19, as well the concept of an artist’s studio when many of us didn’t (and still don’t) have access to one. I also wanted to share my research and development with the groups that I engaged with (both online and in person), and to have have a shared creative process.

The Artist Studio exhibition ran from 9 July - 10 September 2022 at Platform, Glasgow and featured a collaborative mural painted with the Nu Gen group, large scale paintings, vinyls and models by myself and a mini gallery featuring small sculptures made with both the Nu gen and Art Factory groups.

A text by Rhona Warwick Paterson was commissioned to accompany the exhibition: ‘Alice Dansey-Wright’s Wonderland: Propositions from the domestic imaginary’. Extracts from this text are included above and below in bold.

‘In our shared experience of the human world, the artists studio is traditionally a space that proposes the potential for realising ideas. You might imagine a messy space with pots full of brushes, artist pallettes with globs of glossy oil paint, objects too that have their own beautiful words; easel..plinth…armature. These words also embody the poetic understanding of conceptacle - a thing that offers itself to your imagination. For most of us, having the access and means required to have our own artist studio raises divisive questions about who gets to make art, and where and how it is made’