‘Not My First Vault Open Studios’

There is a documentary currently streaming on Mubi, entitled Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, examining the practice of South African artist William Kentridge. Over the course of nine 30-minute episodes, Kentridge speaks to camera, in his studio, about subjects like procrastination, the slipperiness of memory, vanishing points and landscape, and the philosophy of perception. In fact, he not only talks to camera, he also converses with his doppelganger, an alter ego that simultaneously occupies the same screen space for the viewer, but is obviously a separate recording spliced together using the same technique that gave us identical Jeremy Irons twins in Dead Ringers, two Nicholas Cages in Adaptation, or two Dove Camerons as twins in the Disney series Liv & Maddie. Sometimes the voices become more than two, with multiple Kentridges dancing around his vast concrete studio strewn with old encyclopaedia pages and ledgers, sticks of charcoal, bottles of ink, brushes, paper sculptures of mice and coffee pots, actual coffee pots, a 16mm stop motion film camera, and a battered sousaphone. The series allows us to see inside Kentridge’s workplace and witness his various artistic processes. It also, in a way, allows us to see inside the artist’s head.

Art critic James Merrigan refers to the studio as ‘a place of play and risk, experimentation and excess’ and the gallery as ‘an endpoint to that play and risk, experimentation and excess’. Of course, this does not always need to be the case; exhibitions can be waypoints on a longer project’s trajectory, not to mention the notion of the work-in-progress show. However, the studio is very much an extension of the artist’s unconscious mind, a place where things can be worked out without inhibitions, avenues explored freely without the pressure of a fixed outcome, a necessary space where those competing voices argue, discuss, fall out, or come to a consensus. Vault Open Studios, taking place in our Marlborough House building on Victoria Street Belfast, is a rare opportunity, on your doorstep, to peer into these artists’ studios, and what better place to do so than in Northern Ireland’s largest provider of affordable multi-disciplinary studios. On 17 November, the doors will be open, tours and talks will be given; you can wander around the building, enjoy some light refreshments, chat to artists or simply look at finished projects or works in progress, and take in an exhibition by Marta Dyczkowska in our gallery and project space.  

Any artist watching Self-Portrait… would feel envious of the amount of space Kentridge has at his disposal, the sense of stability, something earned no doubt over the course of a long career through hard work, talent, determination and a certain amount of luck. Artists in the North, despite sharing many of these attributes, have a more precarious existence, the closest success we have here in terms of permanent artist studios being our other studio in the Shankill Mission building with its 10+ year lease. The 70 or so artists in Marlborough House face yet another hugely disruptive move to an as yet unknown destination in the near future. The timer is running – come visit us while we’re still here and see what makes us tick. You might even see a few coffee-pots.

Practical information

Our open studio event ‘Not My First Vault Open Studios’ takes place Sunday 17 November (12-5pm) at our city centre premises ‘Vault Marlborough House’, located at 28-32 Victoria St Belfast

Find out more about Marlborough House access and travel info.

Visit our ‘Not My First Vault Open Studios’ Facebook event page for the latest information.

Text by Jonathan Brennan
Image by Leo Boyd