L: Peckham Space opened in June 2010 as London’s newest purpose-built public gallery dedicated to commissioning location-specific artworks made in partnership with community groups. It seeks to encourage progression routes for young people into creative higher education as well as increase access to cultural and educational activity in Peckham.
I came to know the gallery during the first year of my degree when I chose Jessica Voorsanger’s ‘Peckham Heroes’ as the basis for an exhibition review. Since then, I’ve been really interested in the gallery’s commitment to ‘Connecting art, people and place’.

Could you outline the model that Peckham Space uses in its commissioning process?
 

E: I would be happy to talk about that and it is evolving from how it originally started as a result of returning to work with specific groups. As you know we develop a brief with a community group and invite artists to respond to that. The artist is often selected by the community group and the gallery from one of three artists that submit proposals. You might want to expand on that by delving into the issues of how repeat partnerships and evaluation impacts on the artists practice.
 

L: (I do want to delve into that!) Do you find that working in this way invites artists back to work on a second or third project with you? Does the relationship differ second time round?
 

L: It strikes me that the notion of partnerships and trust seem key pillars of Peckham Space’s approach, how have you tried to establish the gallery within the community? Through the commissioning programme working in an ongoing way with specific community groups. Through the Art Clubs – providing free access to creative activity for local family. Through he OPEN Exhibition – an annual exhibition featuring local artist.
 

L: And how do you track the impact of the work you do?
 

L: Perhaps you could site some examples of projects, in particular the current show ‘TRIBE’? I can definitely talk through one of the projects. I might as well use TRIBE to talk about seeing as it is about to open tomorrow. Now this is interesting as for the first time there was not a brief but a day of research that influenced this commission.
 

L: The gallery appears to act as a conduit for connections between, Camberwell (UAL), other funders, artist’s, the art world and the specific groups within the community. How do you and the gallery negotiate these various interests? (I see what Harold’s getting at here and I’d like to ask a similar question. It’s almost a question of how you prioritise, or what your priorities are, but again that feels vague. It errs on the end of ‘how you please’ all parties and meet all needs. Can you suggest how this might be narrowed?) I negotiate the interests depending on where the income comes from to some extent and also where the research of artists takes me. I think this question needs to be more specific.
 

L: Could you talk a little about your personal background? Where did your studies lead you and what have you been involved with since? (I was really interested, the first time we spoke, to hear of your journey to working out what your specific interests are, and needing to negotiate marking criteria, as I am doing, to learn more about that. We have a visiting lecturer programme and, as useful as the talking about their current work is useful, people always comment on how useful it was to hear how they got there. If you’re happy to share a bit of biographical stuff, I think this would be particularly useful to students in the room)

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E: I can talk about how I went to college in the area. I graduated dong performance in a shop window and I now run a gallery not far from the same spot 15 years later. I was involved with cofounding Area 10 an artist run space and whilst there have been an increase in artist run spaces in the area they are now much more commercially savvy and sadly the ones that were not have had to close down as a result of regeneration. For example the site of Area 10 is now flattened and waiting to be bought by a property developer. The Bun House which was a great project in the back room of a pub was sadly closed recently and the pub is now a betting shop. It’s a massive area to discuss and I would suggest keeping this to a minimum as it could take over the slot. I would want to know why this is of interest to you and that might help with keeping the questions focused.
 

L:At this point, I would like to open questions up to the room. It’s absolutely fine to not want to answer if certain things crop up, or to negotiate a slightly different question. Would you be OK with this?