Article written by Alex Wade for the November issue of the magazine.
“To be successful, you need to be a little bit different. You need to take risks.” So says Martin Jorgensen, one half of the duo at the helm of Penryn’s airy, appealing new gallery, the appositely named Open Space Galleries. His partner, Kim Blackbourn, agrees: “We show art that we love, and which we want to be seen as challenging and innovative. We don’t want to be an average gallery.”
Within just a few months of Open Space’s opening in June, Jorgensen and Blackbourn are well on the way to achieving their aims. Open Space has emerged as not merely the new kid on the block but as a strong contender among Cornwall’s top tier of galleries. The mixed show which saw the gallery’s metamorphosis from the online world – which it had inhabited for the previous 18 months – to its bricks and mortar incarnation set the scene, featuring always progressive, often provocative artists such as Jesse Leroy Smith, Volker Stox, Kaisa Karikoski and Heath Hearn.
Consistently intriguing exhibitions have followed but for all that eclecticism might be taken as Open Space’s rationale, its owners are acutely aware that without a sense of professionalism, even the best art can go unsold. As Blackbourn puts it: “You need to pay artists on time, collect their work when you say you will and return it promptly. You need to look after them. And you need to be focused in what you’re doing.”
Fortunately for both artists and visitors alike, Blackbourn and Jorgensen hail from backgrounds in, respectively, marketing and management consultancy. The pair moved from the Cotswolds to set up home in Cornwall in 2005, determined to deploy their business skills in what had always been a passion – the art world. They promptly set up Open Space online and began the search for permanent premises, with Penryn eventually ticking all the right boxes, as Jorgensen explains: “Penryn is fortunate not only in being such a beautiful town, with perhaps the highest proportion of listed buildings in Europe, but in that historically it’s always been overshadowed by Falmouth. It’s therefore remained undeveloped, with all its age-old charm intact.”
Word is spreading rapidly not only about Penryn’s allure but also that of its new gallery. Blackbourn says that the response has been “very encouraging,” and no wonder, for not one artist within Open Space’s well-proportioned, high-ceilinged walls could be described as mediocre. On the one hand, Richard Ballinger’s striking, almost sinister paintings of isolated family holiday destinations share space with Simon Jacques’ remarkable photographic explorations of defective mobile phone technology, while on the other, digital media imagery by Volker Stox is a counterpoint to Stacey Ebel’s measured and evocative pinhole photography. Jesse Leroy Smith, one of Cornwall’s most arresting artists, also shows regularly at Open Space.
Indeed, Leroy Smith is the curator of Open Space’s November exhibition, ‘Revolutions’, which will coincide with the launch of the Revolver Book, itself a celebration of Cornwall’s more experimental artists. As Jorgensen says, “We’re very excited about ‘Revolutions’. The traditional perception of Cornish art as all seascapes can be limiting but a venture such as the Revolver project and book is an opportunity for unknown artists to show what they can do alongside more established figures.” There might, he concedes, be a degree of built-in risk for such a venture, but one thing’s for sure: the owners of Open Space have the wherewithal to hold their nerve and see it through.
