ABSTRACT
The sites of creat ive produc tion and consump tion are often much mytho lo gised. Indeed, special ised spaces such as the artistic studio, the hallowed halls of nine teenth-century European museums, or the once avant-garde white-cube modern ist art gallery, are the site of many power ful imagin ar ies. The twen ti eth-century Pop-Artist Andy Warhol, for example, described his studio as an ‘office space’, while for the eighteenth-century land scape painter J.M.W. Turner, the studio was more a state of mind than an actual place (Daniels, 2011b; Postle, 2009). Other accounts have emphas ised the studio as an archive space, or its place in the form a tion of a prac titioner’s creat ive iden tity; perhaps most famously Virginia Woolf’s emphasis on female creat ive prac ti tion ers needing a ‘room of one’s own’ in order to develop their work. Despite such myth ologisa tion, the actual spaces in which creat ive prac titioners make work have, until recently, largely been over looked. Within geography, attention has been turned to studios over the last few years as part of wider creat ive networks. Bain, for example, describ ing arts prac tice as ‘embed ded within the cultur ally construc ted context of the art world and located within the place-based culture of the studio, the home, the neigh bour hood, the community, the city, the nation’ (2004b, p.425). Spaces of the gallery, and other loca tions of creat ive consump tion, whether it be concert hall or the theatre, have often been better studied. Indeed, there is a rich reper toire of studies explor ing how such
expens ive and priv ileged spaces of creat ive consump tion have been parts of displays of power and national iden tity, or how the polit ics of such displays served to curtail public beha viours creat ing a civil ised popu lace. Recent years have seen the growth of studies that explore less well-known gallery spaces, reflecting more provin cial or over looked stories of their polit ics of display (Neate, 2012).
