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The Sunday Times

Let’s hear it for generous landlords. Last week I wrote about a Brighton couple aged 90 and 82, who let their studios to artists at below-market rates and have only raised the rent once in ten years (see below).

Artists are a key ingredient for dynamic cities. They’re both the harbingers, and victims, of gentrification. They move into a poor area, spruce it up and make it desirable. Then they get priced out. Kate Jenkins, a knitwear designer I interviewed, was priced out of Hoxton, east London, 25 years ago, and moved to Brighton. Now her fellow creatives are leaving expensive Brighton for Hastings, Worthing and beyond. Then the whole cycle starts again.

BBC 1

A theatre group and an art group in Kent have been awarded a free project space. Ashford Theatre Society and Form and Thought, which is a collective of artists, have been given the space at Eureka Park in Ashford. Both organisations have moved into the new space and for at least six months it will be their base. As part of their agreement with Hypha Studios, which awarded the groups the space, they will both be developing a public programme of events. Hypha Studios matches properties and artists to provide free spaces for creative projects.

TimeOut

‘Dumping Ground’ Review

The line between rubbish and art has been trampled over for decades, but this group show at the bottom of a towering office block stomps it to pieces.

The space is pitch dark, its windows blacked out. A heat lamp hangs over a ceramic ear, a landline phone lies on the ground ringing incessantly; there are sheets of scrap wood, a discarded vacuum cleaner, rotting fruit, images of corporate offices smeared in Vaseline.

The Telegraph

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, online shopping and remote working have created a blight of shuttered storefronts and empty office buildings in towns and cities across the world. Allowing artists to infuse life into these vacant commercial spaces, even on a temporary basis, has become one way landlords can address the issue. (They can also burnish their corporate responsibility credentials.)

BBC Front Row

Kirsty Lang talks to its founder Camilla Cole about the process, and to its first beneficiary, artist Molly Stredwick whose temporary studio space is now a shop front in Eastbourne. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Sarah Johnson Studio Manager: Matilda Macari

Spagetthi Boost

It’s a difficult time to be an artist in London. Rents for both homes and studios are rising as part of a wider cost-of-living crisis and a recent report has put the average artist’s income at £12,500 a year. Finding places to exhibit your work is becoming harder as galleries facing the same pressures often prioritise commercially viable works, or worse are forced to close.

Dazed

As a young artist, exhibition space is notoriously hard to come by and, in London this problem is only amplified. Hypha Studios, however, is looking to change that. For the last year and a half, the charity has helped provide creatives across the UK with free space to work and showcase their art, matching them up with everything from abandoned supermarkets to empty shops on dying high streets.

Hypha Studios, which offers support right across the arts – not just contemporary painting and sculpture but music, theatre, poetry, crafts, VR and AR – acquire spaces and then puts out an open call for artists to fill that space with art. Cole elaborates: “When we get a site, we announce it on socials – primarily Instagram – and promote it to artists in the local area.

BBC Radio

Hypha Studios CEO Camilla Cole talks to BBC Radio about their new gallery space in Stratford, a former 8k sqft former sainsburys, with their first exhibition “Taste the Difference” by a collective of artists from Goldsmiths.

Arts & Collections

The exhibition’s title, MELT, pays homage to the legendary FREEZE exhibition curated by Damien Hirst in 1988 – a pivotal moment that echoes the current climate of creative evolution. Just as the Young British Artists emerged from that time, MELT raises poignant questions about the future of contemporary artists amid the wealth of unclaimed spaces.

London Art Round Up

Melissa Vipritskaya Topal’s abstract creations that look like remote controls for an alien games console. The experimentation might not be to everyone’s taste but it’s refreshing and energising to see so many works that don’t just catch your attention from across the room, but hold it once you get up close.

Flo London

Hypha Studios and Creative Land Trust join forces for the MELT exhibition at Frieze 2023, a tribute to the iconic FREEZE exhibition curated by Damien Hirst in 1988. This exciting event features 32 supported artists in London, paying homage to the city’s vibrant creative spirit.

Londonr

A continuous leitmotif connecting all works is the female body. Installations and films examine the forming of feminine bonds through narratives of consumption, both fears of and yearning for, while paintings question the parameters of the body and home.

Property Week

New charity Hypha Studios recognises these issues with a strategy to help landlords, as well as benefit community and footfall. Coming from the cultural sector – which also has economic and spatial struggles – it places local artists into empty units for short-term projects or longer-term studio use.

Big Issue

You’re renting a studio that costs almost the same as your room in a house share,” says Nick Stavri, one of the exhibition’s curators. “It’s difficult to make art to a similar scale and production value you would have had at university.”  So in the old Sainsbury’s, they showed how art can breathe life into places. As a sculpture exhibition, the empty supermarket became a focus of attention.

Reading Today

AN ART collective’s follow-up exhibition is continuing the work of the original at a venue in Reading. Open Collective is returning to the town with Entropy 02: The collection explores the lack of order in the world and the universe’s inherent tendency towards disarray, and draws comparison between this and integration into the community.

Ministry of Arts Podcast

In this episode Gary Mansfield speaks to Hypha Studios (@hyphastudios) Hypha Studios is a charity matching creatives with empty spaces & regenerating the high street with cultural hubs & events for local communities.

BBC London

Tori Taiwo being interviewed on BBC Radio London about her upcoming exhibition Black in South.

Recessed Space

Battersea’s riverfront is a landscape of rebirth and oblivion. It’s woven from water, glass, and rust. Embroidered with crane lights, studded with silted bolts. Once an imperial warehouse, today a repository for capital assets. Luxury flats are built over the rotten planks of industrial wharfs, stretching between the crests of rise and fall.

London TV

Get Living, the UK’s leading build-to-rent operator, has partnered with Hypha Studios, a charity matching creatives with empty spaces for free, to reimagine a former Sainsbury’s store into a unique space for emerging design talent at East Village, London.

Newbloodart

Delighted to announce that Masters Artist Lindsay Mapes is exhibiting as part of MELT which will take place as part of FRIEZE week. “Hypha Studios (HS) x Creative Land Trust (CLT) have joined forces to present a new exhibition, as part of Frieze 2023, spotlighting the work of 32 exceptional artists.

Fad Magazine

In a city pulsating with creative energy, MELT shines a spotlight on the source of London’s artistic vibrancy. Featured prominently are Hypha Studios’ own talent, including Margaret Ayres, Luca Bosani, and Kialy Tihngang. These artists have been granted invaluable free studio and exhibition space in London, a testament to the organisation’s commitment to fostering innovation.

Twin Factory

The brainchild of Camilla Cole and Will Jennings, Hypha Studios emerged as an idea during the pandemic, prompted by the three-sided problem of increasing high street vacancies, loss of community spaces and deteriorating conditions for artists and creatives.

Tom Salmon Podcast

We jumped into Camilla’s experience of working her way up in London’s private art gallery space, why she’s so passionate about curating and championing independent art exhibitions and her mission to reimagine our high streets by working with artists and landlords to create cultural hotspots in empty spaces across the country.