Stage and Intervention: SPACE IS NOT A VOID at The Royal Standard

For her first solo curatorial endeavour at The Royal Standard, the forthcoming SPACE IS NOT A VOID, director Madeline Hall conducts an investigation into transient spatial experience, intending to present “a range of artworks that challenge and explore the medium of contemporary collage... works that could also be defined as sculpture.”

An artist-run gallery, project space and studio complex based at the Vauxhall Business Centre on the northern edge of Liverpool's city centre, The Royal Standard was founded in 2006 by four Liverpool artists and is now run by a team of up to six directors, who work in the role for a spell of two years. Hall is currently approaching the end of her tenure and explains how, usually, the three-week long exhibitions in the gallery space are curated collaboratively by the directors – so, she says, for SPACE IS NOT A VOID, “it’s great to have the opportunity to work in a different way and pursue my own research interests.” She describes how the organisation's position in Liverpool's arts ecology allows it to promote excellence while responding to artists’ needs: “We're small enough to retain flexibility, which also allows us to take risks in programming, providing opportunities for artists working across local, regional, national and international platforms,” she explains. In line with this, SPACE IS NOT A VOID brings two Glasgow artists, Laura Aldridge and Lauren Printy Currie (who is also director of The Duchy), to Liverpool, along with Sheffield-based Emily Musgrave, who caught the curator's eye exhibiting at the Cave Art Fair during the Liverpool Biennial in 2012.

The three artists have not exhibited together before, and in the work selected by Hall, each of them approaches themes of temporality, familiarity and confinement in disparate but overlapping ways. Musgrave's sculptural assemblages knowingly utilise materials that can create barriers to understanding for the viewer: “I often use materials that I have found or seen being used around the city,” she says, adding, “I am interested in obscuring the viewing.”

Similarly, Printy Currie states that the pieces she will be showing “respond to a surplus in materiality,” evoking commonplace structures (in the form of swimming pool edges in work from the Divers series), and simultaneously disrupting artistic conventions with their use of paint on plaster. “Paint as a substance aspires to flatness,” she explains, “[covering] the object's three dimensionality and creating visual propositions rather than tactile ones.”

“I am interested in obscuring the viewing” – Emily Musgrave

Laura Aldridge also recognises the power of altering a familiar subject at its core, and explains how the works that she will be showing “use the structural forms of procession and protest placards as a reference point – although mine are weighted with concrete blocks, as a kind of defiance to the temporality of a sign carried at a rally.”

“We're really lucky to have a space that is very flexible and adaptable,” Hall says of the gallery space at The Royal Standard, which, for previous exhibitions, has been split in two. “It's also less precious than traditional gallery spaces, so we can often shift the space to suit the artist’s work as it develops.” In this case, walls will be ripped down and windows revealed, as Musgrave's large, glassy works must react to their environment through light and shadow. It is also important for Hall that each artist's work will be able to interact with the others, and she refers to a spontaneous and organic style of curating, allowing for a close relationship with artists. This flexible and open attitude towards the role of curator bodes well; in an exhibition that deals with space and place, it is vital that the work is coherent in its interaction with the gallery. This is of particular importance in the case of Musgrave's work, which is altered site-specifically. “Each work is finalised on the site in which it is exhibited, and is usually destroyed after exhibiting,” Musgrave explains, “making it only familiar to the environment it is shown in.”

SPACE IS NOT A VOID will contain both new works and others plucked from series and placed in a new context. Printy Currie describes how she is keen to see how works from Divers – a series of wall-based, plaster and paint sculptures first shown in Glasgow in January this year – will be altered as a result of their juxtaposition with pieces from Musgrave and Aldridge. “I do tend to make work in series with the intention that they are viewed as component parts of one whole,” she says, “but I am interested to see how extracting parts of Divers and showing them with new work may bring them to life in a new way.” As well as showing parts of Divers, Printy Currie will also be producing new works on canvas towards the exhibition – allowing Hall to make use of the wall space in the gallery, as both Musgrave and Aldridge's work is mostly free-standing.

Hall's selections of works by Aldridge – which were originally shown as part of a solo exhibition in 2012 – are also part of a series, or framework. “I could keep making them and have done – this is pretty typical of my work, never just one thing, always many... with different voices,” Aldridge comments. Musgrave, on the other hand, is producing completely new works that have grown out of a previous exhibition: “[They] are a development from the large sculptures I made for The Parallax Curtain at S1 Artspace in Sheffield last November,” she says, “[however,] I am using different materials, which is proving challenging.” The interplay between Musgrave's delicate and temporary sculptures as they respond to the space's environmental phenomena, and Aldridge's weighted, stopped and silenced procession – which refers to the inherently site-specific placard but refuses any particular message – will be intriguing to experience.

Though material investigation plays an important role in each of the three artists' practices – with Musgrave relating her method of “testing materials in order to explore their permanence, value and substance” – also integral are references to literature, philosophy and theory. Likewise, the title of the exhibition is inspired by Edward Relph's Place and Placelessness (1976), an influential book that seeks to philosophically define 'place' – as Hall relates, “Relph's central interest was the human experience of our spatial surroundings, which he argued was a fundamental aspect of people's existence in the world.”

It makes sense that, in an intellectual, material and aesthetic enquiry into an idea as abstract and intangible as space and place, there is this interplay between object and experience in the selected works. Significantly, also evident is a clear awareness of – and interest in – the spatial experience of the visitor, specifically in terms of gallery space and the viewing of art; something Aldridge confirms, describing how her artistic investigations have helped her to “realise and understand how important the space is between the work and the viewer and how it functions.”