Rolling With Colden
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling
The art world is a pretty baffling place: one person’s absurd joke is another person’s profundity. At one end you have chancers, grifters and line-spinners and at the other end, there are what might be called the romantic idealists. We caught up with one of the latter last week. Colden Drystone is trying to bring something relatively rare to this town: an art space, facilitated by one individual, that is run on a ‘not for profit’ basis and exists only to give early-career artists a place to put their creative stuff. He does not do what most gallery owners do: charge a rental fee and or take a percentage of sales. This is high-end idealism: in short, a wonderful madness is unfolding on Silchester Road.
We met Colden in his art-space last week. His business plan is a kind of anti-business plan. As he says, I want to “take money out of the equation.” To give artists an opportunity to put their work “in a public setting without the distractions of profit and commercialism.” This takes a bit of digesting. He explains that what he is trying to do is in some ways a kind of experiment. To see if an art project can gain momentum and traction in the art world, without worrying about the grubby stuff. It strikes us that he is likely to run into some pretty unforgiving financial realities, but Colden is resolute.
His idea is that he will give this space to anyone he thinks is trying something different and needs help. A big part of his philosophy seems to involve empowering young creatives of all sorts. He has already made links with the art department at Hastings College, and very clearly he finds working with young people uplifting and inspiring. He is also planning to allow a young would-be fashion entrepreneur to highlight his new line of tracksuits in the space.
This is quite something when you consider that Colden has already established a considerable reputation for himself in the art world. He has exhibited at the Hannah Barry Gallery in London since 2007 and has had residencies at Cambridge University and exhibited at the Venice Biennale. It could be argued that he is on the way up, but this project is not really about him. It is about helping others and also about seeing what happens if he goes down this road.
The gallery has only been open since June but he has already shown an impressive range of young artists, including Tom Pope, Hatty Hambridge, Holly Dawes, Richard Phoenix, Carla Wright and many more. The key thing he says is that “it must not sit empty.” He does not intend to exhibit his own work at the moment. He wants to keep this project sort of separate from his own work. In some ways though, he agrees, this whole venture could be seen as a kind of artwork in itself: possibly it is what the French theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud, called ‘relational aesthetics,’ an ongoing human social event that is, as it were, the ‘art.’ However, maybe that is going too far down what I believe is called the rabbit-hole of pretentious oblivion.
Back on planet earth, what we have is a small shop-space in St Leonards. It is kind of stark. The current exhibition, by Poppy Vinciguerra, seems to play with that starkness: a tiny wooden sculpture, not much bigger than a match-box sits in the middle of a big white wall. The work is striking partly because it seems so lost in this wide white space. Colden explains that in his view artists should, above all, “take risks” and for him that involves seeking out strange tensions and working with deliberate opposites. Hence, the ‘tiny’ in a ‘large’ space.
Fascinating as this is, it is also clear that he doesn’t like to overthink: “I like to live in the now and go with my first ideas.” It is an interesting approach; a commitment to spontaneity with a few gut instincts beneath it all. His own creative spirit flows in all directions, he makes paintings (currently mainly on glass) but he is also a classically trained musician, experimental film-maker and now, of course, a curator. (His exhibitors are encouraged to use music or soundscapes or film) In some respects, Drystone is a restless set of energies that cannot be neatly summed up.
Only one thing is a fixed point in Colden’s universe: he is a Tottenham Hotspur fan. And the latin motto of the club (Audere est Facere) seems strangely appropriate for his whole approach – ‘To Dare is to Do.’
• instagram.com/colden_drystone;
instagram.com/_c_o_l_d_e_n_s_g_a_l_l_e_r_y
soundcloud.com/c-o-l-d-e-n-s
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