Sorcha Dallas

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an inter­view, so here’s a brief chat with gal­lerist Sorcha Dallas, just in time for the open­ing of Cathy Wilkes’ show at 116 Sword Street tonight.

The inter­view also marks the end of Switch­space, an organ­i­sa­tion founded in 1999 by Sorcha and fellow Glas­gow School of Art grad­u­ate Mar­i­anne Greated to explore alter­na­tive spaces for exhibit­ing art.

So, we might as well start at the begin­ning - what prompted you and Mar­i­anne to set up Switchspace?

We were in our fourth year, and were think­ing about set­ting up a studio and gallery com­plex, to solve some of the logis­ti­cal prob­lems we were facing, and that our peer group was having too. That proved very dif­fi­cult, whether it was in terms of get­ting a space to use from the City Coun­cil or arrang­ing fund­ing for the project. Then, around that time, we were given a talk by Cathy Wilkes, as part of our pro­fes­sional prac­tice course, and she spoke about how she con­verted her flat for a period and did six shows in it, and that just really struck a chord with us. We were both keen to get some­thing up and run­ning instantly, and we liked that DIY atti­tude of being resource­ful and being in full con­trol of start­ing up and run­ning a project. That was the main reason we set it up. Orig­i­nally we just had a couple of shows con­firmed, and we just set it up like that to see what the response would be, to see if people thought that what we were doing was a rel­e­vant thing, to see if people would sup­port it. It really grew and devel­oped from there, because we had such a lot of inter­est, and such a lot of people sup­port­ing us and want­ing to show in that unusual space.

It was in your own flat initially?

Yes. We con­verted my front room, and showed artists there. It was quite intense actu­ally, we were show­ing one or two artists each month, and ended up show­ing 15 artists in the flat over 15 months. It was very intense, but amaz­ing for me per­son­ally - it altered my whole career devel­op­ment. I came out of art school and had my own studio and was making my own work, but work­ing in such close prox­im­ity with other artists - some of them were prac­ti­cally living with me - was such an intense work­ing expe­ri­ence, and I felt really priv­i­leged to have all this going on right in my front room. As a result of that, I really got the bug for work­ing with people, and for sort of sup­port­ing artists in that way. So for me it really had an impact on what I wanted to do.

And when did things shift up a gear from being in your front room to being in other loca­tions around the city?

From the begin­ning, we had the idea for there never to be a fixed gallery space. Obvi­ously it was great to start things out in my flat, and during that time it gave us a chance to move the organ­i­sa­tion on and develop, but after 15 shows in the flat, we began to feel that it had become a fixed space, and to live up to our name we needed to move things on. We were look­ing at var­i­ous options, and we felt that because we’d had such an intense period of exhibit­ing, that we needed a bit of time get­ting our­selves kind of con­sti­tuted, trying to fundraise in some sort of way, because it has been a self-​funded project, up until last year, really. So we took a bit of time out to do that, and were approached by Fab Flats, a prop­erty agency who’d seen a fea­ture on us in Artists’ Newslet­ter. They saw that and approached us, and we bro­kered a deal with them whereby, in exchange for labour clear­ing out spaces for them, we’d get to use the spaces on a tem­po­rary basis to show artists’ work. That’s been the main pro­gramme, since 2001, but during that time we also took over the base­ment space in Off­shore Café, focussing more on cur­rent stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, and we’ve always done one-​off projects along­side every­thing, like set­ting up The Chateau, or using the Project Rooms, or being involved in RAW, or the Art Fair. So we’ve always been inter­ested in not being com­pletely fixed to one pro­gramme, but I guess the project we’ve been run­ning with Fab Flats is the one that’s been clos­est to the aims of what Switch­space is about - moving around between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, and also the edu­ca­tion pro­gramme we’ve been run­ning along­side the shows, bring­ing people from the local com­mu­nity and engage them with the work.

So, as well as the idea of using alter­na­tive spaces, I guess a big part of Switch­space is the idea of seeing how the artists you worked with responded to those spaces, as opposed to show­ing in a straight gallery, so to speak?

Yeah, totally. As a result of that it wasn’t about our cura­to­r­ial vision, it was much more open, a way to offer a range of artists the oppor­tu­nity to show work in unusual con­texts, and as a result for their work to… well, what we wanted them to do was exper­i­ment with it, to really push their prac­tice, so that the expe­ri­ence would ulti­mately be really ben­e­fi­cial to their work at that time, or in terms of their future devel­op­ment. As a result of that, there wasn’t really the pres­sure to do some­thing really final and really fixes, it was more about using the oppor­tu­nity to push their prac­tice. So, yeah, that’s really what we wanted to achieve from it all, really.

Obvi­ously there’s tons and tons to choose from, but can you think of a par­tic­u­lar artist or artists who really took to those ideas, who really had their prac­tice nudged along in a par­tic­u­lar direction?

That’s hard. I mean, I hope that all of them enjoyed the expe­ri­ence, and gained some­thing from it. One show that was really impor­tant to us, in all sorts of ways, was Ian Balloch’s show. He was the first artist to show as part of the Fab Flats part­ner­ship, and he really did enter into the spirit of coming into this large space, and using a lot of found objects and mate­ri­als that were left within that space. Also, one of my dreams has always been to work with Cathy and I think the way she works really lends itself to being shown in an alter­na­tive or unusual sit­u­a­tion, and recently she’s been show­ing a lot inter­na­tion­ally, in more insti­tu­tional or white cube spaces, so I think this show has come at a really good time for her, to show in the shop unit we’re using.

And it’s a nice neat circle, having her as your last artist when she inspired you in the first place…

Oh yeah, absolutely. We really felt that it’s very impor­tant that there’s fixed artist-​run spaces like Trans­mis­sion or what­ever, but it’s also really excit­ing to have a sort of cycli­cal or regen­er­at­ing aspect to artist-​run activ­ity here. Obvi­ously Trans­mis­sion have that in place nat­u­rally thanks to their com­mit­tee struc­ture, but for us it’s some­thing we’ve been involved in now for five years, and we felt that since already in that time there were other artist-​run spaces start­ing to come through, and approach­ing us for advice - places like Mary Mary, who I really feel are the next gen­er­a­tion in terms of what we’ve been doing. So, it feels nat­ural for us to wind things up while the project still feels rel­e­vant, and while we’ve been able to achieve as much as we’d hoped to. It just seems to have hap­pened at a nice time, and also matched up with the two of us now being busy with our own things. And, yeah, that cycli­cal thing with Cathy show­ing as our last artist after she inspired us is a nice way to finish things off.

So to finish up, what’s Cathy up to in the space?

Well, the way Cathy works, she has a very per­sonal response and method of work­ing, and she’s devel­oped that in response to the space. There’s sculp­tural works, and also paint­ings - it’s quite an inti­mate installation.

Posted at 4pm on 08/12/04 by Jack Mottram to the art, interviews category.
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