Margate’s alternative art scene is making waves

Pack your swimsuit and a bucket and spade, and don’t forget your easels. We’re going on a road trip. This Sunday, three galleries in the southeast England seaside town of Margate are teaming up to host joint exhibition openings. Roland Ross, 243 Luz and Well Projects all opened between 2019 and 2023, just a few doors down from each other on Northdown Road, and are now working together to promote the alternative side of the seaside town’s art scene. I asked owners Roland Ross, Ed Leeson of 243 Luz and Kris Lock of Well Projects about the town’s gallery scene, what we can expect to see this weekend and what the future looks like.

Punching above its weight

Margate is a small town with an outsized impact on the arts. For years, it has attracted artists thanks to its fresh air, open space, proximity to London and promise of a lower cost of living. However, Ross, Leeson and Lock tell me there’s a rather narrow and outdated view of the arts in Margate that they want to change. “The press have seemed to date the art scene here back to 2011 when Turner Contemporary opened, but there have been radical project spaces operating in the area since the 1960s. A lot of press coverage over the last couple of years has focused on one or two galleries, which I think has seen people make erroneous assumptions about what is happening in the town.” Leeson tells me. “I think there’s a kind of ‘The Guardian’ view of Margate,” Lock says, “which is a bit one-dimensional and dominated by a few people. The creative scene in Margate is already super diverse with multiple independent arts schools and DIY music venues and lots of studio complexes and galleries.”

Their galleries are part of a recent wave. Well Projects, a community-focused gallery, was founded in Margate in 2019 by Kris Lock and George Harding after they finished their associate programme at Margate’s Open School East. Soon after, in 2022, they were joined by the eponymous Roland Ross. The gallery initially showed recent graduates and otherwise underexposed artists, but has since started showing the work of more established names. The latest to arrive is 243 Luz, founded by Ed Leeson and Diego Ibarra, who moved over from Mexico City. Prior to founding the gallery, Leeson worked for nearly a decade lecturing for Tate and Sotheby’s, while working at commercial galleries.

Strength in numbers

The idea for a joint opening came about through the gallery scene’s sporadic communication, Lock tells me they all have a WhatsApp group. “Our three galleries are in a little cluster in a different part of town to many of the other galleries,” says Leeson. “It’s the furthest you can get from the train station so doing joint openings makes sense.” As Ross adds, “It feels like a common ground is forging between these three spaces, maybe that’s due to our proximity or through shared interests in art, we are all aware of the importance of supporting each other and developing audiences for the artists that we work with as well as for the galleries we run.” Lock agrees, “I think we share a lot of the same values and interests. I’m always super excited to see what Roland and Ed are working on and I know that there is always going to be a lot of crossover with our audiences. Also for smaller spaces like ours, any strategies for sharing labour and mutual support go a long way.”

What’s going on this weekend?

Well Projects will be showing India Nielsen’s paintings of “vivid, gloopy spaces populated by animal stares, deathly presences and capybara romance,.” Lock says. “Trees flourish and bloom whilst buildings burn and happy skeletons zoom off into the sunset. These supernatural spaces, that sit somewhere between the internet culture of the 2000s and a journey into the afterlife, find a kind of buoyancy or hopefulness in the affection and exuberance of their non-human inhabitants.”

Roland Ross will be showing Nat Faulkner’s sculptures and wall-based works which draw on photography and darkroom chemicals: two silver-coated blown-glass spheres that slowly tarnish over time, hand-printed chromogenic prints of zoos and research labs, and a cast iron radiator filled with helium. According to Ross, these works “celebrate through their materiality an open-endedness to knowledge and reality, and acceptance of ‘the unreconciled.’”

At 243 Luz, young Amsterdam-based artist duo Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander will be showing their film Prosecco Wisdom, in Leeson’s words, “a sort of road movie that follows two solo travellers as they drift through a hyper-capitalist holiday paradise full of couples and groups. It riffs on YouTube trends of girls post-breakup travelling to all-inclusive resorts in search of meaning. There is a kind of numb listlessness as they wade through the abject mania of these resorts. It’s funny and also really sad.”

The future of the Margate scene

Staging a joint opening so early in the new year is a bold move. It shows they’re not afraid of upsetting the established scene. So, what’s next for them, and what does the future hold for Margate?

“For the galleries here, I think it’s about finding constructive ways for this to play out. Simple things like sharing openings and pointing our audience towards our gallery neighbours can lead to sharing the costs of art fairs or even working toward more ambitious collaborative exhibition formats like Condo or Minor Attractions,” Lock says.

Leeson agrees. “As London and other major cities continue to be incredibly challenging to operate in, areas just outside the city can offer an opportunity for gallerists to run dynamic programmes that have an international reach via fairs… The town now has the infrastructure to be a hub. An institution with excellent curators in Turner Contemporary, a brilliant art school in Open School East, very good restaurants, bars and hotels, like Fort Road, which was started by the founders of Frieze, and a lot of studio space.”

“Whilst I feel it’s important to work together and celebrate a commonality (i.e. art) I also strongly believe that it’s important for the artists we work with that we distinguish ourselves as being different to one another,” Ross says. “I’m not really interested in trying to predict the future of how things will develop in terms of a scene, but I see there being more opportunities to collaborate in the future. That could be through sharing the costs associated with doing an art fair, shipping, coordinating openings or supporting local publicly funded organisations.”