Tucked away behind Caledonian Road station, a derelict building this weekend played host to an artistic experiment usually reserved for the warehouse galleries of Berlin. The Market Estate Project, a collaborative project between Southern Housing Group and Tall Tales, an arts regeneration project, saw the soon to be demolished Market Estate transformed into a pop up gallery for emerging artists.
The estate, on North Road, displayed work from 75 artists from a wide range of disciplines across 21 flats for just one day. The work included audio visual, painting, photography and installations, and was created in between the last remaining residents moving out and bulldozers moving in.
The urgency that was created by this temporary nature of the project seemed to generate an atmosphere among the 1,800 attendees, with the once desolate corridors of the building brimming with eager art lovers, peering through windows and wandering in and out of the illuminated flats curiously.
Highlights included Rebecca Glover’s giant blue spikes emerging from the walls of Flat 51 and Jess Blandford and Joe Morris’s Fluorescent Yellow Room which emerged the viewer in overpowering fluorescent colour, playing on how human eyes react to colour to great effect.
Mini Galleries
Further enjoyment came from walking between the flats , with the most unexpected places transformed into mini galleries. An eye catching laser light show emerged as the centrepiece of the project on nightfall and on ascending one of the staircases a multitude of post it notes formed a portrait of former resident Jim Veal, who was integral to the generation of the new homes that residents moved into before his death in 2006.
An unexpected treasure trove of creativity, hopefully the Market Estate project is the beginning of a more experimental way of experiencing art in the city.
Image Credit – Lydia Warren
