The way Brett Payne sees it, the turmoil at Yorkshire ArtSpace over recent months is a sad case of history repeating itself. “We started the organisation in the first place to avoid this,” he tells me over the phone, “and we’ve ended up back where we started.” Brett, a silversmith, declined to join the tenants association that formed earlier this year to fight the changes taking place — feeling, at 67, that he’s at the tail end of his career — but he hopes they can preserve the charity’s ethos. “YAS [Yorkshire ArtSpace] don’t seem to understand that they’ve inherited an organisation that was built by artists, for artists,” he says. “It’s such a waste, such a shame, to take something so innovative, so special and so unique in the UK — and destroy it.”
At least from the outside, YAS certainly doesn’t look destroyed. Persistence Works — the UK’s first ever purpose-built studio complex, completed in 2001 — is standing as strong as ever, a short walk from the station. There’s also Exchange Place, the former WH Smith building in the Castlegate Quarter, which the charity took over in 2013. Across both buildings, YAS rents 123 studios to around 170 creatives, which has led Arts Council England to dub them “one of the leading artist studio spaces in Europe”. In response to our questions, YAS director Georgina Kettlewell insisted the recent changes are purely to “enable us to continue supporting artists for another 50 years”.
Within the city’s tight-knit artistic community, however, whispers have been circulating. One studio holder says they’ve been approached multiple times by those who’ve heard rumours of the fraught dealings going on. “It’s a bit annoying having people coming up to you saying it sounds like a nightmare being there,” they say, “when that’s actually not the case.” Unlike Brett, they seem more unhappy with the tenants’ association than the charity acting as their landlord — hence why they asked to remain anonymous, fearful of being shunned. “It got to a point where I didn’t want to go to the studio,” they admit, “because I’d be accosted by someone saying don’t do this, don’t do that, have you done this, have you done that.”
We first learned all was not well at YAS in March, when an artist who had decided to abandon their studio because of recent events — allegedly not the only one — sent us a series of cryptic voice notes. Since then, finding studio holders willing to speak has not proven easy. The reason why became clear last week, when we were shown an email sent by the YAS Tenants’ Association, reminding its members to keep schtum. “Studio holders are obviously free to act as they wish in this matter,” it reads, “however our advice remains the same as it always has: don’t talk to the press.”
Fortunately for us, if there’s any group of people that can be relied upon to not do what they’re told, it’s artists.
Hi! I’m Mollie, I wrote today’s story. Long form investigative features like this one take a lot of time to get right: we spend hours fact checking, analysing financial records and poring over interview transcripts to make sure we’re getting the nuances of our sources' perspectives across.
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