Mother Studios

Next time you happen to find yourself on the outskirts of a city, navigating your way through disused industrial wasteland, you may be able to spot certain clues that suggest all may not quite be what it seems.

You might notice some unusual graffiti perhaps, or a small rainbow randomly adorning a warehouse door, or a small flyer quietly announcing the presence of an art gallery lurking inside an outwardly unremarkable building. It’s on an autumn afternoon that I find myself being educated in the art of espying such detail. ‘Ooh look at that piece of chewing gum’, says my amiable guide, excitedly pointing at a blob of the black stuff, long embedded in the floor of a desolate warehouse in Hackney. But this is no ordinary piece of chewing gum, it’s a canvas for an ornate micro-painting, and this is no ordinary warehouse, it’s Mother Studios in Hackney Wick.

My guide is Jo Hughes, artist and leaseholder of the former chocolate factory that now comprises 38 artist studios, run on a not-for-profit basis. Presiding over the lease since 2001, Hughes has found herself at the centre of the Hackney Wick arts scene, a scene which boasts of having the highest concentration of artists in the world, and has attracted attention from the international media.

An eloquent and knowledgeable host, Hughes cuts an intriguing figure as she leads me on a tour of her locale. She laughs wearily when I ask her how on earth she happened to undertake such a huge project.

‘I was in Shoreditch and I had a lovely studio, but it wasn’t big enough. At that time two of the major providers [of artist’s studios], Acme and Space, had lost loads of their buildings. It was so bad that Acme actually shut their application list. It was all because of the development boom. It was hideous. I couldn’t find anything that I would call at a reasonable rent- it was all extremely expensive and extremely dodgy, with nothing in between. Broken windows, dodgy landlords, leaking roofs….it just wasn’t worth the hassle.’

‘So.…(laughs self-consciously) I had a massive change of heart and climbed up La Breche de Roland in the Pyrenees on the French side. But I don’t do mountains, I’m not a mountain climber. I was encouraged by my boyfriend and before I knew it I’d got to the top. It was a bit of a hairy scramble at the top so I felt massively satisfied when I got there. And the summer winds from Spain came through, it was so warm. And I thought to myself “y’know what? My life in London is shit at the moment”. And I felt really stuck. I needed a shake up. So I thought “I’m going to go and set up my own studios. I can do it”. It was about having the confidence. I don’t know how I managed it, don’t know how it happened. I spent lots of time on buses researching, and that was such a nice time- looking around London in a different way, not looking to consume, not looking for green spaces. I was looking in industrial estates and dodgy buildings. Six months later I found this place, and I said “I’ll take it”’.

She laughs again at the improbability of her story. But the realisation of her mountain epiphany was to prove far from straightforward: ‘It all most broke me, I almost had a breakdown,’ she says. ‘Because I didn’t have my shit together. I wasn’t a business person, I was an artist. I was concerned with creativity and lateral thinking and suddenly I had to get my act together, borrow money, convince people to lend me money. I actually went looking for funding and they all closed their doors on me. And I realised that the Arts Council were pretty unhelpful. I didn’t know that funding for what I was doing existed, and apparently it did. But anyway it’s all worked out nicely….’