1 Royal Terrace: Conversations About Art

We catch up with the founders of up and coming Glasgow gallery 1 Royal Terrace in advance of their second programme of exhibitions, now underway

Feature by Arne Wern | 01 Apr 2015

Colloquy is the title of the second series of solo exhibitions of emerging artists at one of Glasgow's young producer run exhibition venues, 1 Royal Terrace. Ruth Switalski and Petter Yxell founded the curious gallery in 2013, their first year after graduating from GSA, and since then have run the one-room venue in Switalski’s own home alongside their own practices and further education.

The 2015 spring programme kicks off with Laurence Figgis installed in the front room gallery space until 19 April. Following him will be Joy Bonfield Colombara and Hugh Lyndon Barrell, from 3 until 24 May, and finally Birthe Jørgensen from 7 until 28 June. What makes 1 Royal Terrace noteworthy is the peculiar mixture of professional demand with which Switalski and Yxell run the space, alongside the fact that they not only allow the spontaneity of conversation to flow into its programme, but that it is actually fully based on it.

It is evident in conversation with Switalski that they run the programme true to the ambitious desire to really get things going on their own terms, to fully use its opportunity for conversation with emerging practices and serendipity that may lead to curious outcomes, without shying away from possible obstacles. In fact the setting of the space, a front room in a residential Georgian tenement, overlooking the edges of Kelvingrove Park, makes for a comparably difficult context for everyone involved in making and experiencing the exhibitions. For Switalski and Yxell it was part of their ambition to professionalism to push for the room's transition from a solely domestic function into an adequate exhibition space without stripping it of its conversational potential for artists' work. Benefiting from a sensitivity for questions of perception in connection to architecture that stems from their own practices, they want to use the space as a testing ground for interaction, not just for the artists invited, but for their audience too.

“We expected people to make more of the fact it’s a domestic space, but I think because of the way we’ve presented the space and the way we’ve presented the programme, people kind of overlook that quite quickly. It’s good to have those limitations – there’s not so much you can do with a space, but actually there’s a lot in that.”

This pursuit to explore fuelled the inaugural programme of 1RT, a fluid series of six solo exhibitions by emerging artists whose different practices interacted with the space on many different layers, from Helen Shaddock’s seemingly playful settlements of small strongly pigmented plaster casts in sensitive conversation with the fitted shelves and parquet flooring, to Rachel Levine’s sculptural artefacts of material and dimensional displacement, that blended into the room by resigning from adding any more colour to it than its own emulsion white.

Switalski and Yxell choose the artists for their programmes based on who they would like to work with and whose work they think would make an interesting contribution, putting an emphasis on the value of existing connections to artists just like them. The artists are invited to set up a show without any proposals, allowing for a freedom of processes and conversation that they consider as a vital strategy for exhibiting: “A lot of the time we have no idea what someone’s planning on doing until three days before they show up with a load of work and we make it work in the space. And that’s really exciting for us. Part of our decisions for choosing pople is that we have faith in their entire practice, and that’s what you need as an artist.”


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Colloquy, Mar-Jun 2015, 1 Royal Terrace, Sat & Sun 12-5pm, free http://1royalterrace.co.uk