Studio Visit is a practice-based research project, co-created with the artist Levin Haegele, that investigates the conditions under which artists make work — and the reciprocal question of how artists make place. Although distributed through podcast infrastructure, each episode is conceived and produced as a discrete audio documentary: scripted, scored and edited as a work in its own right. Sound is used as a research instrument, registering the acoustic and material texture of the studio — its silences, its post-industrial architectures, its domestic overlaps — in ways that writing and photography cannot.
The project takes its historical bearing from SPACE, founded in 1968 by Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley on the premise that artists require affordable, self-organised room in which to work, and that securing it is itself a civic act. Nearly six decades on, Studio Visit asks what has become of that premise. What role do artists play in shaping the city today, and on whose terms? What conditions — precarity, displacement, rising rents, migration, the privatisation of urban space — are artists obliged to adapt to? And how are the urban, civic and rural spheres held together within a single working life: the metropolitan studio, the residency, the kitchen table, the edgeland, the regional landscape?
Season One is grounded in London, widely held to be Europe's artistic capital, while extending to the Cornish countryside and to Ayrshire, unsettling the assumption that artistic labour is a metropolitan phenomenon.
Its knowledge exchange value lies in reach and reciprocity. Produced independently with Tabari, Dubai, and made freely available, the work circulates to audiences well beyond the academy through podcast distribution platform Acast, while returning documentary value to the artists, studio organisations and residency programmes it engages. It constitutes a growing oral and sonic archive of artistic labour in Britain at a moment of acute pressure on studio provision.
Celia Hempton, Raffaela Naldi-Rossano, Jai Chuhan, Sunil Gupta, Charan Singh, Hannah Brown, and Chris Hugh-Mackenzie.
