The summer’s not over yet – contemporary art at Castlefield.

Kevin Bourke discovers the difference between commission and concession, and finds a survival strategy with sweets and tea, all at Castlefield Gallery

‘Summer House is half studio and half gallery,’ explains director Kwong Lee of the ambitious new project at Castlefield Gallery. In it, artists and collectives such as Association, Ting-Ting Cheng, Barney & Lucy Heywood, Alexandra Wolkowicz and Zero Point Collaboration answered an open invitation to respond to artist-led curation – in effect, this means artists curate their own show.

‘The gallery has become a kind of lab,’ says Lee, ‘where the artists work on material without any finished product in mind, but where they think about the process – how a piece of art is made, what kind of meaning it has – and test those things with their peers. We wanted to allow artists to hold a mirror up to their own practice. So some of the work in Summer House could be very raw or unfinished. Visitors might see an artist in the middle of filming or editing or moving things around or painting.’

It’s a brave idea, not least because the outcomes of the project are so uncertain, but for Lee it makes perfect sense. ‘In terms of contemporary practice, anything is possible,’ he says, ‘but where the rigour is, or perhaps where it becomes good art, is where it is tested with peers and audiences, courageous programmers and so-called experts.’ Summer House deliberately blurs the line between gallery and studio, artist and critic, with the project evolving over the autumn as different groups of artists – not necessarily overlapping – come in and collaborate in this, their ‘temporary second home, or urban retreat’.

Survival strategy

That’s not all. Running in parallel to Summer House is Feral Trade Café, a grocery import-export project that’s the brainchild of Bristol-based artist Kate Rich. The artist describes the business ‘as a survival strategy for operating in an art world of diminishing returns, using the art world to run a small business.’ Rich’s own social network of artists, curators and friends have brought drinks and snacks from all over the world to be ‘ferally’ traded in Manchester – as evidenced by a menu of tea from Bangladesh, tortillas from Mexico and sweets from Serbia, each of which is served up with details of the route from supplier to gallery. It’s a creative alternative to the likes of international shipping companies such as DHL, circumventing the official global supply chain by using friends to bring goods with them on journeys they would ordinarily make.

Both projects started up in late August, with a series of mini-exhibitions, discussions and events in and around the gallery scheduled to run through September and early October – our favourite is Home and Away, a photo show that includes the work of Ting-Ting Cheng, Joanna Zylinska, Chu Yin-Hua and Alexandra Wolkowicz, and Barney & Lucy Heywood (until 5 Sept), although if you fancy yourself a critic, creator or collaborator, you’ve got the rest of the month to get down to Castlefield and flex your creative muscles (or at least eat sweets and drink tea).

Summer House and Feral Trade Café, Castlefield Gallery, until 10 October (Wed-Sun, 1pm-6pm). Free. Image: The Family, AAS, courtesy Castlefield Gallery. Below: Barney & Lucy Heywood, ‘The End’.

The End from Barney Heywood on Vimeo.

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