Garage

• Neil Cooper
• 17 August 2012

This article is from 2012.

Off-piste, enjoyable compendium of grassroots art

In a residential garage, a portable TV sits on a rug on the floor, a bouquet of flowers laid down before it. On-screen a collage of scenes from a 1980s TV compendium of schlocky horror play out in Rebecca Key and Melodien’s ‘Sevant! Sevant! Vol 1: Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’. On the walls around it and in two other garages either side, pages of text-book guides to motherhood are pinned up and subverted by Ailie Rutherford’s overlaid drawings of suckling pigs and jets of milk shooting from nipples, or else cotton reels criss-cross each other as they run from a clump of coloured straws plugged into the wall by Jo Arksey.

With a dozen or so artists’ works crammed into the three spaces alongside some back garden and front cellar installations, GARAGE is an ingeniously busy temporary occupation of places used for private hoarding or else plain old car parking. It’s also a wonderfully off-piste example of a thriving grass-roots that exists on our own doorstep to potter about in.

Garage, North West Northumberland Street Lane, 07917 668 044, 18 & 19, 25 & 26 Aug, or by appointment.