Zoe Preece: Pacing the Perimeter

Abstract

An artist’s studio reflects a kind of human geography, a social mapping of space as important to them as the doors and walls of the architecture itself. This is what Edward Soja terms as a ‘Third Space’, a rather brilliant notion that, put simply, declares that positioned in-between ‘real’ space (the bricks and mortar of 24 Tudor Lane) and ‘imagined’ space (our claim to that building as a collective of artists), lies a ‘third space’ where those bricks and rental contracts are turned into a sanctuary, become invested with individual and collective agency.

The studio is itself a poetic example, devoted to, and enabling thoughts and feelings to be given form. This ‘Third Space’ is precisely where creativity takes place, arising from the friction between the concrete objective world and the narratives of ownership and identity that surround it. We take from the physical: corners and walkways, doorways and tables and attribute to them social or personal meaning.

To gain permission to view an artist’s studio and recognise it as much as a psychological structure as a physical one, is to gain privileged insight into their social mapping, their interrelatedness with the world. This is the premise on which I want to explore the work and working environment of Zoe Preece, one of the members of Fireworks co-operative.