Simon Morrissey, curator at Harbourside gallery WORKS|PROJECTS, tells Shipshape about the joys and challenges of running a bold contemporary artspace down a Harbourside back alley
What brought you to a gallery on the Harbourside?
I was actually born in Bristol but only lived here for six months before my family moved to South Wales. I didn’t have any plan to come back to work in Bristol – it just sort of happened through a chain of circumstances. After working as a gallery manager, exhibitions curator and teacher, I was asked to do some teaching on the University of the West of England Fine Art course. I was living in London then, but soon decided to move my family to Somerset. Slowly more and more of my activity took place here. In 2003 Arnolfini asked me to curate the exhibition that would close the building before it was refurbished. I kept getting asked to teach and to curate exhibitions in Bristol, including one for Spike Island in 2008. Shortly afterwards I decided to open WORKS|PROJECTS.
What are the advantages, and the challenges, of having a contemporary gallery in a quiet Harbourside street?
In many ways where we are made who we are. When I first decided to open the gallery in 2008 Lucy Byatt, then Director of Spike Island artspace, virtually insisted I open the gallery next to Spike. The space she offered me allowed us to stage the ambitious shows that we have built our reputation on. The low rents compared to London, or even a more expensive area of Bristol like Clifton, mean that we can afford a much bigger space here, so our exhibitions have been ambitious and we’ve quickly got noticed both nationally and internationally.
The one disadvantage of being here is that we are quite invisible to the majority of the Bristol public. We have a loyal audience but you have to know we are here – or seek us out. Most Bristolians aren’t aware that they can buy some of the best art in the city down a graffitied back street!
What does being next to Spike Island mean for you?
We are right in the heart of Bristol’s contemporary art culture. More than any other institution in the city, Spike Island is where contemporary art is produced as well as exhibited – via its dozens of artist’s studios, the UWE Fine Art degree course based here, and much more besides. The block around Spike Island, meanwhile, is quickly becoming the ‘gallery quarter’ of Bristol. As a visitor on any given day you could visit exhibitions at four different venues – Spike Island, Picture This, WORKS|PROJECTS and Bristol Diving School. And this group includes public, commercial and artist-run spaces, so you’ve got real variety down here.
What do you think could improve the Harbourside?
Some more joined-up promotion. Our end of things is perhaps a little overlooked, and something as simple as some intelligent council signage directing visitors to the host of free culture just yards from ss Great Britain could do wonders. Oh, and a wrecking ball could be useful – I can think of a few eyesores I’d particularly like to level to the ground. The only consolation is that M Shed is such a sensitive re-imagining of an existing building – both fantastically contemporary and historically sensitive at once.
The Harbour’s traditionally been a place of skilled manual crafts and labour… how do you see its present, and its future?
It’s easy to associate the area with tourist attractions like M Shed and ss Great Britain, but what’s interesting is that it’s still very much a place of production. Especially at its western end, there’s a rawness that I find inspiring, and there is production around every corner. Some of that production is still in the Harbour’s traditional fields – boats, leather-making, engineering – and some of it is in new cultural industries like Aardman Animations, TV prop-making and the mass of art and design studios around Spike Island. Though they may seem very different, both these new and old industries are about a skilled marriage of head and hand – and they keep alive that living, working environment that is vitally important to the Harbourside’s character.
More: worksprojects.co.uk