A DELICATE MATTER/LAWRENCE MALLOY

LAWRENCE: This is an idea I had when I was making Art, I couldn’t find the space or the money and I had one piece of work in particular, it cost about £500 to make and it was only going to last about four weeks.
Four years ago I worked with trick photography and made a gallery out of cardboard and I thought lets use that idea a step further and use that to solve this problem. So I made the Gallery a perfect 1:12 scale of a Georgian design gallery and base it on Leeds City Art Gallery. Then I built the art work to go inside it and printed out a load of invites and handed them out to people and basically have a private view in my bedroom. After that talked to East Street Arts and put it forward to see if other artist’s would be interested in being involved. So I decided to run it fully as a gallery with a business plan and everything, whereas in the past I would just quickly print out invites, this time it has a proper press procedures and curating and installing exhibitions. So in every sense it now operates as a fully functional Art Gallery, it has accounts, a board of directors and rather being a kind of model.

PETER: Can you tell me how you pick the artist’s and does the space change with every show?
LAWRENCE: Originally how we got the Artist’s we put adverts across Artist’s information websites and sent information to places like the Cornerhouse, we had an advert in AN and we had about 200 people asking for more information about the Art Gallery, so we sent them a press pack and we’ve chosen what we think are the best proposals.
We’ve just had our fourth, it’s currently closed and it has to have some renovation done which was from the last exhibition. That exhibition was by an Artist called July Holland, it was a four screen installation, which in a 36 inch gallery is a complicated thing to do. But all of our exhibitions so far have been very different, we had wooden cut outs for the first one which was Emma Bolland’s where she created a park, the seond one was a giant diarama based on The Sun Fjiord by Albert Norman and then we had another one by David Chalkely which was a cast base which took up the whole of the floor and the next exhibition is by a guy called Charlie Beatis who is using shadow and wallpaper as the two main materials she’s using the design of the gallery to ompliment her work, she makes site specific wallpapers.
The gallery has spotlights all working and a new roof based upon the Kimble Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. So inconclusion the gallery is based on a Greogorian style, Leeds City Art Gallery morphed into Kimble Art Museum.