During London’s Busiest Art Week, £50k Initiative Champions City’s ‘Grass Roots’ Ecosystem

During London’s busiest art week, replete with ticketed fairs and guest-listed events, artists, curators and collectives are set to benefit from an estimated £50,000 worth of free exhibition space, thanks to a seven-exhibition initiative by the arts charity Hypha Studios. 

The exhibiting artists, whose shows will be free for visitors (with private views open to all), were selected from 150 applications via an open call. The exhibitions will take place across sites in Euston, the City of London and five separate spaces within Hypha’s new building on Southwark Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from Tate Modern, which boasts around 800 square metres of gallery space. 

Hypha Studios, which was established in 2021, is one of a small but growing number of organisations turning vacant buildings into artist studios and exhibition spaces across the capital. “The grass roots of the ecosystem don’t really get fed much,” the charity’s founder and chief executive Camilla Cole told Ocula. “It’s hard to get sites; it’s hard to get opportunities.”

The selected projects reflect the diversity of London’s artistic output. They range in subject and tone from a “fermented and alive” exhibition that promises to collapse “the distance between laboratory, studio, building site and ecosystem” to a show featuring 35 members of the 120-year-old Royal Society of Sculptors. 

But all have something in common: they were produced without regard for the often prohibitively high cost of hiring exhibition space in the city, meaning less commercial pressure on exhibitors. “We’re free to experiment in any way that we want,” said curator Salomé Jacques, whose exhibition To the Wonder studies the impact of ancient ideas on contemporary artists. “I’m not sure if it would have been possible in another space.”

Across London, affordable space to show and sell their work is a perennial concern for emerging artists. At Frieze London in 2023, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan pledged to build 71,000 square metres of affordable workspaces, including artist studios, by 2026. At the beginning of this year, it was announced that the Creative Enterprise Zones initiative is on course to meet this goal.

Cole launched Hypha Studios after spending a year on the curating course at Goldsmiths, University of London. Despite meeting many talented curators during her studies, she concluded that “these people need spaces, they don’t need another curator”.

“Free space isn’t that lucrative,” Cole told Ocula, but she manages to sustain Hypha Studios through a patchwork of funding sources. These include local councils, Arts Council England, Business Improvement Districts initiatives and Hypha Curates, an online platform through which artists involved with Hypha sell their work. 

Currently, the charity’s website lists 15 sites across the country occupied by studios, galleries and project spaces, with remits and programmes as varied as this week’s exhibition programming. “Letting innovation take place is more interesting to me than predicting the money aspect of it,” Cole said.