With studio spaces in the city center becoming more and more expensive and hard to come by, many Singaporean artists are uprooting their lives and moving in to spaces formerly for industrial business and factories.
While the rent in these buildings in the eastern part of the city are much more accessible, many artists struggle to come up with the money up front needed to make improvements like adding air conditioning, partitions, and lighting. That’s why the artists are teaming up with other creative individuals to split the costs of refurbishment and share the space within.
The efforts of these artists are starting to take hold, and more and more art is being seen in spaces alongside other traditional industrial businesses.
The former factory and warehouse spaces are ideal for artists, one painter who rents the space says. Lots of open space, ready access to light, and few columns obstructing the flow of a studio are necessary for a successful art space. Another pair of artists who share a studio in one of the warehouses often convert their space into an exhibition hall, showing their work and the work of other artists, meaning that the eastern part of the city that was formerly home to industrial warehouses is getting new life breathed into it thanks to these artistic endeavors.
Sharing spaces with other artists has had other benefits from just saving money. Creating art can often require artists to be in their own personal bubble, working alone in a solitary space. But through sharing the space with other creative minds, artists can gain friends, emotional support, and can even bounce off their ideas with other artists, leading to a kind of creative incubator effect. Feedback and encouragement can help artists determine how to steer their existing works that might have stalled out because of brain blocks.
The seemingly endless open spaces at these factory studios brings out the best in artists. One artist turned her space into an art installation itself, stenciled blue and red stars and triangles covering the walls and floor, a variety of mediums like chains, toy basketballs, and colorful wires making something of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
Embrace your inner artist by checking out all the art classes you can enroll in on SGArtClass.com. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned artist looking to branch out in other genres that would benefit your body of work or someone who has never had any art instruction in your life. Teachers are adept at instructing at all levels, and you will soon find yourself able to start and complete creative projects you never thought you would. Take a class in anything from found art to installation art, 3-D sculpture to oil landscape painting, fashion design to comic book drawing. There is an art class for everyone.
To read more about Singaporean artists working to transform factory space into creative studio space, go to http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/factory-art-singapore-s-artists-head-for-industrial-buildings-in/3389450.html.