Artist-led: 37 Looe Street
An ongoing series profiling artist-led groups in the South West. This month we are celebrating 37 Looe Street.
Can you tell us about 37 Looe St, who you are and what you do?
37 Looe Street is an artist-led gallery, test space and residency space. It is part of the former Plymouth Arts Centre and honours its legacy by providing a space for contemporary artists to show and develop work. We are about building and supporting communities - being part of an interdisciplinary arts ecosystem and also being firmly located within Plymouth, working with the people in the Barbican, with archives, with the more-than-human.
37 Looe Street effectively operates as a hub for our heritage and culture strategy and policy work, for our curatorial and producing activities and for our own individual and collaborative art practice. That’s really what we are about - a social understanding of art that is based in culture, heritage and community, and that aims to think big - ideas, development, making, bringing serious play to the neighbourhood.
Early in our history, we hosted the Clare Thornton Memorial Residency (CMTR) - residencies initially set up in 2018 by Clare herself and Cheryl Jones, Nemia Maclachlan, Emily Speed and Dane Watkins to support mid-career artists looking to try something new, change direction or re-start careers. After Clare’s death, we worked with the rest of the group to select artists from an open application process. In 2021, we hosted Lisa Watts and Dad, who developed their material and games-making skills following their initial collaboration, My Crazy Family Golf. And in 2022, Sarah Duffy spent time with us to confront her difficult relationship to crafting and constructing physical objects with her hands. Before the CTMRs, we hosted Kate Rich’s COVID-era online FeralMBA that connected artists working with business models in Tasmania, Bristol and Plymouth. Those early experiences really influenced us to focus on supporting artists to (re)enter making and exhibition, on the materiality of the city, and on centring administration and bureaucracy in our practice.
In addition to joyfully and sometimes provocatively mixing contemporary arts (visual, screen-based, performance), commercial art, socially engaged practices, and community art, we operate a number of different models. We rent the space, we take splits of sales, we sometimes run a bar, we seek sponsorship. We deliberately haven’t sought ACE funding as we’re concerned about our capacity for reporting (we also work in higher education and run an arts and heritage consultancy so are pretty to-the-brim with reporting) and don’t want to chase external funding just to support an administrator. We also work with a queer edge and that’s part of it - a DIY ethos with a strong commitment to quality and having high expectations for our events and exhibitions and for our audiences.
Can you tell us why you set up and why an artist-led approach, and how your artist-led group is important in the context that you are working in?
In terms of origin stories, we began with a manifesting statement: let’s start a queer feminist art collective! A mother’s fall from a ladder, the loss of Plymouth Arts Centre’s NPO status and sale of the Trust’s assets, and a menopausal-Covid-break created the circumstances that enabled a move to Plymouth. We joined a community of fellow Bristol and London exiles and of longer-term Plymothians. We launched the live-work-residency-workshop-test space-gallery-imprint-clubhouse in 2020 with the two Clare Thornton Memorial Residencies (Lisa Watts and Sarah Duffy), the first UK expression of Kate Rich’s FeralMBA, with the colonial entanglements of what we found under our floors and in the walls for Plymouth Art Weekender and CAMP (Contemporary Art Membership Platform).
How we work and what we do is informed by our Atlantic/Pacific lived experiences and connections into Canada and Asia. Rather than archipelagic thinking (after Édouard Glissant), this is fjordic work where inlets and islands shape our ways of being in, on and of land-water. The visible and the hidden. Belonging and exile. Messy and magpie. Sense through juxtaposition. Curation as dialectical montage. Our working-class-immigrant and international-development-class family backgrounds inform our shared global cosmopolitan imagination in the small regional city. Examples of that are our collaborations with Queer District Collective and the First Thursday exhibitions in the city and our curatorial takeovers like The Magnificent T-Shirt Show (Polly Rayner-Woodrow and Jake Visser). And we keep returning to structures and different ways of working. Julia Pond came to us with her Metabolizer! idea, which is part of her practice-based PhD. Over 6 weeks, she built a solo dance pod that used a simple motion capture app and a bespoke data dashboard to explore the potential of ’non-productive’ dance data in response to late-stage capitalism. Our annual Gullfest exhibition, festival and procession is also the work of the loose queer community of Plymouth in collaboration with the extraordinary community of Barbican gulls.
Can you describe what sort of space you run out of and the context of your project?
37 Looe Street is a small, street-level gallery space - a 5m x 5m white cube with windows. It’s part of the old Plymouth Arts Centre and will be familiar to many through that. Funding is a movable feast and we’re interested in having conversations with folk. There are lots of models we can work with, including reciprocity and mutual benefit. We’ve had artists help us out with training and marketing for example, in exchange for using the space. Our toilets are not accessible and our main (only) entrance is an almost street-level door (up one step) that can be accessed by non-powered wheelchairs.
Can you tell us about what you are currently working on, do you have any projects coming up you’d like to let people know about?
We’ve just closed our summer exhibition, Bathing Places. This focused on watery worlds, on swimming and swim places and featured 28 artists across painting, printing, performance, film, sound, writing. The exhibition ran from 11 June-26 September and we were incredibly blessed to have a lovely gang of artist-invigilators to help keep things open throughout. We know lots of galleries go dark over summer, but we had a steady stream of Plymothians and tourists pop in to escape the heat. Over our 15 weeks, we welcomed around 400 people, which feels pretty great. We’ve had some incredible experiences. Our evening of performances on 27 August featured Mark Leahy’s Swim Litany - a score and performance of 158 swims, at 27 locations, over 12 months, with 24 people- and Jessica Akerman and Clare Charles’ Chorus for a Full Moon - which cast a song into the sea for the Sturgeon Moon. On 26 September, we held a closing night of film at Plymouth Arts Cinema, which featured all of the artist moving image works in the exhibition and a work-in-progress by Vesna Lukic and Nicole Khayat.
This autumn, we’re hosting Sovay Berriman’s two-week residency, which will focus on installing and responding to her screenwork, Maylya, and working with copper pipes stripped out of the old Plymouth Arts Centre. This will culminate in an opening on the Friday of the Plymouth Art Weekender (16 October). Sam Machell then joins us from 23 Oct-6 Nov with Battle of the Dying of the Light, a durational performance in drawings and objects.
Further ahead, we’re getting ready for 2027 to focus on remakes, remixes and re-enactments to mark the 80th anniversary of the foundation of Plymouth Arts Centre. And, of course, there’s Gullfest 4 coming up next spring and we’ll be putting out an open call for our December 2027 exhibition, Dream Sequence. We put calls and information out on our Instagram: @37looestreet and our website 37LooeStreet.org.
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