It's a 'centre of excellence for tea-drinking, philosophising and hare-brained schemes', including a pointless hole in the ground and the Wheelie-Bin Disco. Fionola Meredith visits the Lawrence Street artists' workshops, in Belfast
Tucked away down an alley in the university area of south Belfast, the Lawrence Street Workshops are easily overlooked. But behind the big blue wooden gate, the century-old stables courtyard hums with creative energy. A colourful diversity of artists, photographers, musicians and craftspeople occupy every nook and cranny of this dusty, messy, friendly space.
The first thing you notice is that it's crammed with the bits and pieces of everyday life. Plants grow haphazardly in a cluster of old chimney pots around the entrance; a rowan tree pops up at a rakish angle from a rusty oil drum. Inside, ancient tricycles, prams and bits of unidentifiable steel piping are suspended from the roof; age-spotted mirrors vie for space with Technicolor rubber mats made from shredded banknotes; a mouldering leopardskin bar stool skulks in the corner beside a cobwebbed double bass. And a rickety cast-iron spiral staircase - rescued from a skip - leads to more rooms within rooms upstairs, each filled with yet more random cast-off treasures, carefully retrieved and awaiting their transformation into improbable objets d'art.
So what's the inspiration behind it all? Martin Carter, who founded the workshops in 1987, is a former antique-shop owner with a commitment to working with recycled and reclaimed materials. It's been a lifelong passion for Carter, who was born and grew up on the nearby Ormeau Road; he was an ardent recycler before anyone else in Ireland had even heard of the term. Sitting on a bench he created from reclaimed cedar - "I don't dominate the wood; I go with it" - he recalls how preparations for the massive bonfires traditionally held in loyalist areas each July 11th gave him the opportunity to begin his recycling career. "By the age of 12 I'd be running out to the bonfire, finding bits and pieces of furniture on the pile and bringing them home. All they needed was a bit of TLC. I got a good settee and a couple of chairs that way."
Many of the artists and craftspeople who operate from the workshops share Carter's delight in the possibilities offered by reclaimed objects. Katie Blue, an artist, says nothing is safe from her enthusiasm for recycling. She uses "a treasure trove of rubbish", including beads, buttons, shoes, handbags, rubber ducks, knives and forks and even cuckoo clocks, to make her distinctive mixed-media junk-art sculptures. Claire Sampson, a stone sculptor who occupies a sunlit cubbyhole at the entrance to the workshops, enjoys working with recycled stone from old buildings. "The existing architectural moulding on the stone can be part of the inspiration to turn it into something new," she says.
Carter himself is a specialist in what he calls "upcycling": turning green Grolsch beer bottles or blue Harvey's Bristol Cream bottles into stylish tumblers and wine glasses. But when it comes to the most wildly inventive transformation of everyday junk into art, Nicky Keogh and Paddy Bloomer - known collectively as Tatterdandelion, in an obscure reference to their excessively frayed trousers - can't be beaten. One of their bizarre creations, the Wheelie-Bin Disco, is parked under a tarpaulin in the workshops' front yard. From the outside it looks just one of the four-wheeled industrial bins that are usually filled to overflowing at the back of restaurants. But peer in and you'll see an opulently upholstered red and gold brocade interior. It's also equipped with a sound system.
Bloomer and Keogh gave their souped-up bin an outing on the streets of Kilkenny last summer, during the city's arts festival, where it provoked mirth and perplexity in equal parts. "Everything has to have a hook, even when it comes to public art. If people like Pimp My Ride," says Keogh, referring to the MTV show in which viewers' cars are lavishly revamped and customised, "they'll like Pimp My Bin."
One of their undertakings, the Bin Boat, represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale arts festival in 2005. The eccentric water craft was built from all kinds of scrap material, including a wheelbarrow, a bath and an old washing machine. The Bin Boat took six months to put together at the Lawrence Street Workshops. Built to run on chip fat, it was based on a two-cylinder diesel engine "bought from a guy called Jim on Rathlin Island", says Bloomer. Like the Bin Disco, it has a fully functioning sound system. Once they took to the canals of Venice, the Belfast gondoliers and their unorthodox boat had many Venetians shaking their heads in disbelief.
Bloomer and Keogh say they regard the workshops as "a centre of excellence for tea-drinking, philosophising and hare-brained schemes." It seems that the social side of life at the workshops indeed consists of sitting around on battered sofas, smoking roll-ups, dunking biscuits in mugs of tea and discussing a range of wonderfully barmy ideas.
Carter recently put a whimsical advert in a local arts-and-culture newspaper, the Vacuum, designed to entice local artists to rent space at the Lawrence Street site. In it, he listed the perks on offer: "Musical remedies available to order . . . Cat rescue and ladder hire . . . Tea-drinking service (BYO milk) . . . Exhibitionists accommodated . . . 24-hour crazy pool . . . Recycling likely". It's a pretty accurate description of life at the workshops.
It's not just artists who gravitate to Lawrence Street. "Rainbow" George Weiss, an eccentric political activist given to spending money in flamboyant, Elton John-like proportions, has a base there, from which he masterminds his epic campaigns. As part of his latest endeavour, the Make Politicians History campaign, Weiss, who was a friend of the late English satirist Peter Cook, sent postcards to everyone on the electoral register in Belfast, urging them to tick a box confirming that they agreed with his policy of getting rid of the North's elected representatives. He put the returned postcards (admittedly very few in number) in a two-metre (seven-foot) rainbow-coloured Perspex tick that Carter built.
Although the workshops were originally run as a collective, they have not been formally organised in recent years. According to Bloomer and Keogh, this means "there are no more boring meetings and rarely any bog roll". The enterprise is managed by Carter, on the most slender of shoestrings.
Carter believes it's important to help fledgling artists, so he tries to commission an artwork from them or allows them rent-free space until they get themselves on their feet. Yet it's becoming increasingly difficult to make ends meet, as the workshops aren't subsidised. And now there's a real threat. As a manufacturing space, the workshops may be forced to pay astronomical rates under a scheme due to begin in April next year, even though other community buildings in the North, such as Orange halls, are to be exempted.
"I don't know how much longer we can keep going," Carter says. "As a business we're making a loss. We really are in pretty bad shape; every bill is crippling." Carter believes the workshops' location is working against them. "It would be different if we were based in a political ghetto, but we're not, so we don't get financial help. We don't fit into the funding criteria; we don't tick the boxes. It's all because we don't have the support of one side of the political community or the other. That's frustrating, and it's not going to get any easier."
No visit to the Lawrence Street Workshops is complete without viewing the three-metre (10-foot) hole in the centre of the yard, excavated one stormy autumn night by a work party consisting of Carter, Bloomer, Keogh and a posse of eager children. Why did they decide to dig up the yard? "Just to find out what's down there." After bashing their way through 30 centimetres (six inches) of concrete, they managed to hollow out a rudimentary clay pit "big enough for two people to sit in comfort", according to Keogh. Some day they plan to expand the space still further; their ultimate aim is to make it big enough to accommodate "seven down the hole with soup and a roll".
The loose collaboration of maverick inventors, junk artists and amateur philosophers at the Lawrence Street Workshops is unique in Belfast. But they have been teetering on the financial edge for years. It would be bitterly ironic, in these post-conflict days, if their political neutrality were their final undoing.