Artisits move in to set up free galleries and studios as credit crunch forces stores out of business
By Edd McCracken, Arts Correspondent

IT gives new meaning to the term "artists colony". While empty shops punctuating high streets may have become a defining, if depressing, feature of the credit crunch, Scotland's artists are finding these spaces left behind by collapsing retailers perfect for setting up impromptu galleries and studios.

Until last autumn the clothing store Oasis occupied one corner of Princes Square shopping mall in Glasgow.

Now, where the changing rooms used to be, there are plaster sculptures; the manager's office hosts a video installation of a human transforming into a werewolf; and artist Sandy Smith has turned the shopfront into his workspace.

Princes Square gave over the prime retail unit to Smith for free to use as a workshop and exhibition space for a month. It is an experiment being increasingly repeated across Scotland, according to Smith.

"Artists will always produce work regardless of what the economy is doing," says Smith. "And with a crisis in rents and retail space, it will open up areas that will just sit and get derelict."

The public have been "curious", he added: "People like seeing something happening in the space, as opposed to vinyl over the windows. It's an empty space that people ignored. It was nice to draw attention to it."

On Renfrew Street in Glasgow a former sofa showroom which had lain empty for months opened as an exhibition space Just Worked On on Friday evening. It featured 30 works from students at the nearby Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow artists.

Conceptual installations were displayed alongside more conventional painted canvases and photography.

Inspired by Smith's use of retail space in Princes Square, Peter Schoffer, a first year Masters in Fine Art student, enquired about the empty shop only a week prior to the opening.

"We got really lucky," he said. "Artists are looking at these spaces more and more. It keeps the space alive as a community base."

So far most artist "colonies" have had a brief shelf-life. Just Worked On was open for only 24 hours and it is expected that Smith's workshop will be turned back into a shop soon as well. But others hope the trend of artists on our high streets will become a lasting legacy of the credit crunch.

In February Cumbernauld's modernist shopping centre, famously decried as "a carbuncle" by Prospect magazine, gave ten empty shops to 15 students from the Edinburgh College of Art to transform. Rent, heating, and electricity were free.

"The management were just happy for the shops to be used," said Neville Rae, a 26-year-old art lecturer at the ECA. "They were interested to see them full, being used creatively and bringing the community in."

Some of the art seemed to comment wryly on our current crisis in consumer confidence with one artist opening a store that sold fresh air.

"Local people saw things in a different light and were challenged as well," said Rae. "It revitalised the area, and brought a different crowd to Cumbernauld too. It's all been positive."

Rae has big plans for how artists can transform decaying shopping centres.

"I'd like to have professional artists in these shops. It won't rival the Venice Biannale, but these are empty spaces in a beautiful modernist building."

The trend is not confined to Glasgow or Scotland's moribund new towns. In Edinburgh landlords gave a shop in Bruntsfield over to a collective of artists in March. Across the city, the third floor of St Margaret's House, a semi-abandoned tower block, has recently been colonised by artists and transformed into Embassy, a gallery and studio.

The Scottish Arts Council described the recent trend as a "no-brainer, win-win situation" for artists and landlords.

Amanda Catto, head of visual arts, urged local authorities to be generous with their empty buildings. It should be "inbuilt" into their arts policy, she said.

"But we have to beware artists being exploited.

"Often what happens is artists inhabit and animate dead parts of town. And when the developers come in the artists are pushed out when prices go up."