Interview with Julia Alvarez

AL: Let’s start off with the gallery! We were wondering when it was that it started, and how that came about?

JA: We opened the first space in 2001, in the next door pub, which is called the Brown Bear. It had been bought by a charity and they weren’t doing anything with it, so I said let’s start an art gallery. Originally it was just me and my friends from Goldsmiths, sharing and putting on exhibitions, inviting people down, and from there it has progressed.

We bought this building that we’re currently in, in 2005. When we made this decision, we had to write up a business plan and make the gallery more self-sustaining. So the gallery has changed a little bit, but still maintains our strong curatorial focus on covering emerging artists, that’s our raison d’etre! We go to art fairs and represent artists as well, so we try to keep the two things in balance, and that really comes from my background.

I graduated from Goldsmiths from the Visual Culture course in (I shouldn’t say…), 2001. I went to work for Matt’s Gallery in the East End, who have a fantastic curator, and an amazing space in which they have very strong curatorial exhibitions, often by young artists. I also worked for Hales Gallery, which is on Deptford High Street, which had more of a commercial focus, but also the history of showing artists like Mike Nelson and Jake & Dinos Chapman. So it was a really interesting set of galleries to work for in terms of finding out what I was all about, and I think that very much shaped my focus for the gallery now, being both commercial and curatorial.

And so since you’ve moved in to the gallery space, and with that change of focus – what have you enjoyed the most?

I think working with artists – people will always say that – but building really strong working relationships with artists has been very enjoyable. When you run a gallery you’re quite naive about how you work with people I think. You have to develop ways in which to collaborate with artists and sometimes you have to be quite strong in the way you go about things and set boundaries. I think I’ve most enjoyed learning about that; I think that is such a specialism — people underestimate the working relationship between the gallery and the artists.

The other thing is getting to know the area and the community. I’ve been in Deptford for nine years, and I’ve always seen the potential in the area. There’s always something happening and so many characters interacting – from the lady that runs the egg shop, to the director of APT Gallery. Getting to know these people has been brilliant and that led to the Deptford Art Map and wanting to share that with other people.

Your next show is The Assistant! This sounds really exciting!

The Assistant came about as the director of Peer approached me about perhaps working with us on an exhibition. Peer is an organization that provide mentoring but also peer-to-peer critiques to students after they leave college, so it’s a really good resource. They had come up with this idea of The Assistant, which would pair up an established artist (director artist), with an emerging artist, who would be ‘the assistant artist’. I immediately thought this sounded really interesting, and so we started to have a discourse about artists working as assistants, and the legacy of where that started, from Bridget Riley to Damien Hirst. Now it seems almost like a right-of passage for artists, that they might work for another artist.

So we approached two director artists, Maria Fusco, who is the head of the Creative Writing course at Goldsmiths and Gordon Cheung, who is a well known painter. We asked them to write a list of five instructions for the assistant artist to create an exhibition.

The assistant artists, are Kate Pickering and Blue Curry, both of whom were at Goldsmiths. Kate is mainly a text-based artist, and Blue Curry is very object based — there’s a whole discourse around his work. Kate will install first and her exhibition will run for two weeks and then Blue Curry after her for two weeks also. We’ve already launched The Assistant blog, where by people are also able to submit their assistant stories online — and it’s been brilliant! You’ve got to look at this! We’ve had to blank out the names, or the places, but you can tell…

Ok so let’s talk about the Deptford Art Map – which is still quite a new phenomenon. Art Licks came on one of the Deptford Art Walks not so long ago and thought it was fantastic. You’ve mentioned that you have this connection with the area, but how did you decide to do make the map and the tours, and how did you go about doing it?

Yes, well the way in which the Deptford Art Map started was a seed of an idea perhaps about four years ago, not necessarily a new idea, but I was aware of this area as quite unique and the potential of people coming to this area and being able to visit several places, rather than just one.

About a year ago, I got the project to a point where I felt that it was feasible. I gathered together 10 gallery owners at the time, and we sat round the table, had some wine, had some sushi and I pitched the idea to them. To my surprise everyone was really happy to go ahead with it. So although this is a project that has been initiated and managed through BEARSPACE, it is very much been the product of a collaboration between all the galleries. We still meet together quarterly to brainstorm and share each other’s programmes, see what’s going on. Although we have very different programmes, priorities for our galleries and types of artists, the great thing is that people are able to almost put that to one side and look at the core of what the area is about, in terms of art and how we can help each other to promote and provide the best experience possible for visitors coming to the area.

Out of the Map, then came the monthly Deptford Art Walks, which you came on, and these have been a great success; it’s all about accessibility really. These walks take you round in a group to meet the different gallery owners and artists in their studios. An extension of that is art and food, cause the area has so many different places, from African food to Vietnamese to fine dining, so we’ve started doing a sort of art and food tour as well, tying it in to different things in the area.

Then there’s Deptford Last Fridays as well. This started, well I suppose really from the model of the First Thursdays, but from that idea of having everything open on the same night. This is an evening when people can come down and see everything and then perhaps go for a meal afterwards, or there’s the party at the Old Police Station. We’re also starting to do Deptford Last Fridays’ tours, and I think that’s really interesting as that’s the night when you have a lot of performances going on, talks, private views – there’s a slightly more buzzy atmosphere.

There’s a really good structure to the art scene in this area now, that new galleries and studios can almost drop in to. Before I think it was a little bit like, you’d start your initiative in your corner and advertise to a small circle of people; whereas now, you can start your initiatives and hook it in to all the things that are going on. So what we’ve seen is there are now five or six more galleries springing up, purely because they feel there is something for them to fit in to. Two of the studio complexes have now opened galleries as well, there’s one called Core Gallery and Frameworks as well. Let’s face it, no one wants to put an exhibition on and sit there with no one coming in — you want people to see it! But with all these things going on in the area centered around the art scene, you know people are going to come round.

If you could take anybody, on the tour, who would you take!?

Oh gosh. I think if I could take anyone….. ahh that’s really hard to be put on the spot – I was going to say Johnny Depp but that would be purely out of my own reason!

No, I would like to take round Amanda Sharp or Matthew Slotover as I reckon they should relocate Frieze in the Deptford Project Space!

BEARSPACE Gallery/ The Deptford Art Map