End of paper days – interview with PAPER Director David Hancock

Jo Manby

Accompanying the review of Paper After All, the final exhibition to be staged at PAPER Gallery in Manchester, is an interview with David Hancock, the gallery cofounder and director, who reviews a decade-long programme of 77 gallery shows, rising to over a hundred including off-site projects, art fairs and overseas collaborations, along with a well-established history of running artist and writer residencies and championing young and emerging to mid-career artists, recent graduates to art lecturers practicing alongside their teaching.

Jo Manby: What was the defining moment, or what sparked the decision, to make paper a criterion for art shown at PAPER Gallery? Can you remember a moment when you suddenly realised that was the way it would go?

David Hancock: When I started the gallery, it was basically me and two other MA students, Andrea Cotton and Nicola Smith. We all did the MA at Liverpool John Moores from 2008-2010. At the time both me and Andrea were making work on paper and Nicola was predominantly a performance artist, but she was looking at postal art and using postcards. So, when we set up the space it just seemed a really interesting USP that we would just focus on work on paper. Shortly after there were quite a few work on paper shows – The First Cut at Manchester Art Gallery and also On Paper at Saatchi Gallery, so it was a bit of a zeitgeist, like ceramics is now. But it was mostly because that was what our practices were and then we opened up to other artists who were working with paper.

JM: How long after did that happen? Was that quite soon after setting up?

DH: Nicola’s partner Ian Smith was a graphic designer. He was also working at Manchester Art Gallery on their design themes, so he helped us with branding and with the initial look of the gallery, because we wanted to make a gallery space that was accessible. You can see – it’s still on the homepage – we’ve got a manifesto and I think that one of the things we wanted to do was put art in everyone’s home, and work on paper tends to be much more affordable, so we wanted to create a gallery where people could buy work and see that buying original artwork is affordable and you don’t just have to go to Ikea and buy shitty prints. So that was the ethos, and we had this space come up at the studio I manage that would work well as a gallery space because it was accessible directly from the street. A lot of things fell into place. It was quite a serendipitous moment.

JM: Does that make it easier in a way, this ten-year lifespan, the fact that it was based on a zeitgeist in a way?

DH: One of the problems is I’m doing lots of other things. I’m a full-time lecturer and I also have my own practice. In terms of a business model, I think we hit a ceiling, because the problem with work on paper is that it tends to be more affordable, but we were coming to the point where we were looking at the bigger, more high-profile art fairs, and we ended up being priced out because of the amount of work that we would have had to have sold to cover the costs of doing the art fairs. We could never have fitted enough work on the stand to make it viable.

There is also still quite a lot of prejudice against work on paper in the artworld. They see it as less valuable. Even if your practice is centred around work on paper, and that’s all you do, people would still consider them as sketches for bigger paintings. So as a business model it probably wasn’t the best one. The other issue with it was when we started to represent artists, we weren’t always able to represent their whole practice, which meant either they would have to make work on paper exclusively for us, or they would show their other work with other galleries. It started to feel like we were forcing our artists to work in a particular way. Pushing work on paper as affordable worked really well, but in terms of building long-term relationships with artists, because we set it up as an artist-run commercial gallery, wasn’t always viable long term.

JM: PAPER seems to have constantly showed artists who push the medium to the limits, technically, conceptually, formally, and so on. Has it ever been difficult to find artists who push boundaries in this way? I suppose with that limitation of it being paper-related?

DH: No, actually finding good artists who make work on paper has never been an issue, there’s so many amazing artists out there. Running PAPER has been great, and it will hopefully continue to be great in whatever form it now takes. I’ve loved to present work by a variety of artists and champion emerging artists, mid-career artists, and a diverse range of artists primarily from the North of England, but beyond that as well. We’ve shown lots of exciting artists over the years.

JM: Have there been times when you have thought, no, we’re stretching the remit too far, we have to diversify? Show things that aren’t reliant on paper as a medium or support?

DH: No, for example, an artist like James Moore, who was creating animated work that started off as paintings and he would scan them in and work on them in After Effects and short films. The work that Vincent James made during his residency with us where he did these stop-frame animations that spread across and interacted with the gallery space. He did one animation a week where he’d move these paper cut-outs all around the space to create this amazing animation. So, I don’t think paper is that limiting.

JM: I suppose in a way it’s universal to artists and a means towards something else.

DH: It’s kind of what you start ideas with. If you’re trying to come up with a way of visualizing something, the first thing you grab is a sheet of paper to draw it out. Before Google, everybody used to draw maps to places on bits of scrap paper.

JM: Looking at the breadth of the programming across the past decade, to what extent has it been important to promote art that breaks boundaries, is political, or is not afraid to experiment?

DH: We’ve always tried to push the programme as much as possible. It started out being almost like a shop; we had magazines and zines, but we found that that model didn’t work very well. We just didn’t get the footfall to warrant trying to run it as a shop. Also trying to have a really low price point on work meant that it was difficult to get really good quality work in. So, over time we shifted and changed what we did to accommodate what artists wanted and how they wanted to push the boundaries of their practice. There was a really amazing show with the collective Totaller, a collaboration with Sheffield-based artists Lesley Guy, Lea Torp Nielsen and Dale Holmes. They just had this amazing installation in the gallery made from pulped pizza packaging, advertising and cardboard cut-outs. It was just so bizarre and strange but it was utterly brilliant. And they also asked other artists to bring in work to be added into the installation. It pushed the boundaries of what you could do in the space. Each year we invited artists in to do a residency. They would come in and basically take over the space for 6 weeks to develop ideas for new work that would be presented several months later. Frances Disley, Vincent James, Rachel Wrigley, Olivia Punnett, and Ruby Tingle all undertook amazing residencies in the space.

JM: Is the curation of the exhibitions something that has become increasingly second nature, or is it always an interesting challenge to curate?

DH: The last few shows, we got Arts Council funding to work with a group of writers and we invited them to curate two person shows in the galleries and it was interesting to see how they responded to the space as well. It’s nice when it’s not always me who curates everything – sometimes I worry that I’m just hanging stuff in the same way so a change of curator is good. I think we’ve been able to do so much with such a small space – the space is 3m square. Sometimes we did intense, overhung shows because that was the point of the exhibition. Sometimes we wanted to keep them quite minimal. For Narbi Price’s show, Codeword, we just had two paintings, one on each wall. And it held the space really well. Whereas, for On Paper, we basically had sixty artists to fit in the space and that was quite a full hang, almost four deep on the walls. Then you have a show like Leslie Thompson’s My New Favourite Shop where we transformed it into a shop.

JM: What’s been the driving force behind taking part in art fairs, both nationally and internationally?

DH: I’ve always loved art fairs. Based in Manchester, I used to go to London and I’d be there for a few days cramming everything in. Going to art fairs is like going into a shopping centre where everything’s in one place. You know it’s an art fair, you know people are there to buy art, but you can still see amazing work. Art fairs are places where you get to see work that’s pretty much hot off the press. Artists will make art for the fair, and it’s available to view shortly after it’s been finished. All the commercial galleries are all in one place and it just makes it so much easier to see everything.

So, my experience of seeing art from being quite young has always been art fairs and I’ve always been intrigued by them and especially if my work was showing at one, I’d always go and help out and, not necessarily be on the stand, but I’d help them install. I’ve always been interested in the gubbins of the artworld, how it functions. Art fairs are one of the main places where we’re able to sell work, and therefore support artists. As long as I’m covering my costs, I’m happy too, so it works out for everyone.

If we put on a show at PAPER, we might get 300 people. If we do an art fair, we’ll probably get 20,000 – 50,000 people passing through. The amount of people who see that artist’s work is phenomenal. We did Manchester Contemporary a couple of weeks back, and I’m not exaggerating, the only time we didn’t have one person on the stand was when the fair opened on the Sunday morning for maybe half an hour or so. The rest of the time, the art fair was absolutely rammed and we would always have somebody on the stand. At the gallery, on a Saturday, we might get 15, 20 people. At the art fair you get that in five minutes.

JM: How important has regional and national collaboration, like with Saul Hay in Manchester and the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy for Paper After All, been in shaping the way PAPER works?

DH: We’ve always been keen to collaborate with other galleries and it’s a way to get our artists showing around the world. Once, we did this terrible art fair in Cologne, hardly anybody came, but because it was so quiet, we were just talking to the other art galleries and from that art fair, I ended up doing some really big exhibitions. We worked with a gallery in Valencia, Kir Royal, and did a major show Paper Dialogues; we did another one in Switzerland with a-space in Basel and Lucerne, called Into the Deep Woods. That was just from doing one art fair. It’s also an opportunity to bring artists back to Manchester as well. We’ve had some really amazing artists showing at the gallery. Like Tim Noble of Noble and Webster; we’ve had Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs showing at the gallery, and all these came from links with other galleries. Sometimes when I look back at some of the people that we’ve shown, we’ve had Turner Prize nominees such as George Shaw; and this is a gallery in Manchester that’s 3m square. The last show, we’re working with Saul Hay and the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy. The RCA approached us about doing a show and obviously their space is huge and ours is tiny, so I thought, in order to be able to accommodate this, I approached Saul Hay and Ian there was really up for doing it. So, it was a good way to show our artists’ work in this beautiful space in Conwy and then bring all this work to manage and work with Saul Hay.

JM: How has your longstanding experience of lecturing and of being around art students informed what you have been doing at PAPER in terms of freshness of ideas?

DH: We’ve done a number of shows with graduates of Salford over the years, but also shown some of the teaching staff as well. Most of the lecturers are practicing artists and make fantastic work and it’s great to present their work. We opened a smaller second space at PAPER which was functioning as more of a project space. That’s been really good for giving a number of artists their first exhibitions after graduation. So, probably the first show that Short Supply did of their own work was at PAPER shortly after graduating. We’ve had amazing shows from Alicja Mrozowska, Foday Kabba, and Jade Magenta Williams, all graduates from University of Salford. Sometimes it’s good to have somebody believe in your work and that you are a good artist.

JM: Going back to the beginnings of PAPER, and before PAPER, when you began to champion so many underrepresented artists and young people, what was the motivating factor behind your nurturing approach?

DH: We ran Warsaw Projects when I used to be at Open Studio. We showed people like Gemma Parker, Matt Davies, and Darren Nixon, who showed with us at PAPER 15 years later. These were their first solo exhibitions after graduation. We had the space and I just wanted to support young emerging artists because I realised how tough it was for me when I graduated. In the mid-90s it was very much fend for yourself. You didn’t do much professional practice, and I was really lucky that I had my friend Juno Doran, an established photographer who moved to Manchester, and helped me write proposals and applications. That was really transformative. The artist Ben Cook was a really big help as well. I used to work in the 50p shop on Oldham Street in Manchester that sold lengths of material. Ben used to come in and buy mis-printed football kit material. When he’d come in we’d have a chat and if I needed some advice or if I was stuck on something I’d ask him.

Having that support is really important. I felt I could hopefully contribute to that for emerging artists in the city. When artists become successful, it benefits everybody in the city and puts Manchester on the map. If Manchester’s got a thriving art scene and you’ve got young artists who are able to kickstart their careers in the city, then it makes Manchester a destination and you get more artists and more opportunities available to everyone. If there are more artists then there are more studio spaces, there’s more project spaces, there’s more exhibition spaces. So, supporting artists at an early stage and encouraging them to stay in the city and not go elsewhere is important in developing a vibrant art scene.

This also influences my teaching, and I learn as much from my students as they do from me. It keeps my practice fresh as well. There’re discussions I have with students where you have to understand their perspective and how they think. You’ve got to stay relevant to them. It’s incredibly inspiring, working with students.

JM: So, there’s this thing where artists create cultural life in an area and then gentrification steps in and the artists have to move out. Can you see any solution to the fact that somewhere like PAPER has to close to make way for new build basically?

DH: You kind of know it’s inevitable. The only way round it is to do what Hot Bed Press or Islington Mill have done and someone buys the building who is part of the art scene or get Arts Council funding to cover the cost of buying the building. It’s part of the system that we’re in where it’s all about profit, and there is no profit in artists’ studios. I think there’s a wider issue with the arts in this country where it’s not seen as being as valuable. Certainly not as much as it is in other places. It seems to be much lower on the agenda and even though the creative economy brings in so much money, it’s not valued.

JM: The freedom of not being tied to a building and a programme, that’s one thing you spoke about previously, but also about carrying on doing things on a project-by-project basis.

DH: The benefits of having a building is that you can do a regular programme of exhibitions, everyone knows where you are and that you’re going to be there all the time and the other thing is you can develop these reciprocal relationships and if you’ve not got a space then it becomes quite difficult to do that. So having a space is useful and it’s the reason we could do all those reciprocal shows because we could present those artists in Manchester. To artists outside Manchester – Manchester is an incredibly cool city and artists want to show here. It’s easy to overlook that. Manchester is really glamorous. It’s a destination. To an artist in New York, they want to show in Manchester, because Manchester is seen as a really cool hip city.

JM: If you could pick three snapshots, three examples of what have been the best PAPER meetings/ moments/ memories over the years, what would they be?

DH: One of the best moments could have been Art Rotterdam in 2016 and presenting work at that level of art fair. We almost sold everything we had on the stand by Lisa Wilkens. That led onto lots of opportunities for her. There were galleries in Belgium and the Netherlands who wanted to work with her. Another really good moment was at London Art Fair in 2017, where we won Best Stand prize, with Bethan Hamilton, Lisa Wilkens and Hannah Farrell. I’ve really enjoyed all of it – we’ve had amazing shows and the opportunity to show so many artists’ work. The last show, Paper After All, is our 77th exhibition. On top of that there’s also been shows in project spaces, art fairs, and off-site projects. Well over a hundred exhibitions in ten years. I’m just really proud of what we’ve done. PAPER’s been a bit like the Tardis, in the sense of the scale of what we’ve been able to achieve. Another show I was really proud of was Into a Light at the Saatchi Gallery. We worked with LLE from Cardiff and showed Ilona Kiss, Ruby Tingle, James Moore, among others. A show at Saatchi – how cool is that? I kind of wish I’d put myself in it!