Beyond the Partitions: Queen Street Studios, Belfast, 1994.
Works on Paper, Queen Street Studios, Belfast, 1994.
These are especially important catalogues in relation to Northern Irish art of the eighties and nineties. From the seventies onwards, artists, especially in the Republic of Ireland, pooled together into collectives, so as to acquire studios and exhibiting spaces: Temple Bar Studios and the Fire Station in Dublin for example, The National Sculpture Factory in Cork, Artspace in Galway, to which one can add the Northwest Artists’ Collective in Derry and Donegal, Art and Research Exchange (ARE), Flax Art, and the Artists’ Collective in the North, the last-named (via ARE) leading to Queen Street Studios.
In the early eighties there were few galleries in Belfast. There was the ACNI gallery in Bedford Street (blown up in 1987!), Caldwell’s in Bradbury Place, the Bell Gallery in Adelaide Park, and the Octagon (primarily dealing in prints) in Lower Crescent. These were soon joined by the Fenderesky Gallery, On The Wall (later The Kerlin), the Otter Gallery, Queen’s Common Room, and the Crescent Arts Centre. Outside Belfast were the Harmony Hill Arts Centre in Lisburn, the small Corridor Gallery in Lisburn, run by the artist Victor Sloan, the Peacock Gallery in Craigavon and the Orchard Gallery in Derry.
Queen’s Street Studios, formerly a printer’s warehouse at No.91, was the pioneering studio group in the North, housing close to seventy artists in its first decade. It was on the fourth floor – eight flights of steps – and there was no lift! It also had no central heating, and so was bitterly cold in Winter. Everywhere, there were partitions. The roof leaked. The wind regularly played symphonies of a Stockhausian atonality. Pigeons kept deciding that it was really their space. But the artists persevered. I used to visit the place regularly, often to see new work by the likes of Jack Pakenham, Vivian Burnside, Anne Carlisle, Gerry Gleason, Brian Connolly, Gerry Devlin, Colin McGookin – and the list goes on and on.
(l-r) covers of Queen Street Studios publications
Let us face it, the place was a hive of activity. In an excellent introductory essay Nuala Gregory, herself an artist, chronicles the decade, paying particular attention to the constant struggles with the ACNI, in terms of trying to get them to give the group a reasonable rent. As the comparison with the Council’s southern counterpart demonstrated, ACNI did not fare well.
There are fifty folio pages of colour photographs of artists’ work (regrettably uncaptioned), and, most usefully, short biographies of the artists at the rear of the book.
As for the companion catalogue, Works on Paper 1994, forty-two residents, past and present, were given a sheet (60×40 inches), 410-gram Somerset Satin printmaking paper, and asked to work in portrait format on a subject of their choice. In conjunction with the Beyond the Partition catalogue, its forty-two colour, folio images provide a snapshot of the art of the period.
For those of you too young to remember when the studios started, Belfast was still tightly in the grip of The Troubles. Queen Street RUC station was close by, so there were continuous bomb threats. Helicopters reverberated overhead. There were so many bombings that Jack Pakenham and his wife Ethel, who had children, vowed never to go into town together so that the children would always have at least one parent…
Brian McAvera, August 2026
Copies of these volumes are available in the NI Visual Art Research Library & Archive at the Golden Thread Gallery. NIVARLA items in the rare and special collection will be available to view by appointment. We will share more information on how to access and use NIVARLA soon!
The Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive is supported by the Ampersand Foundation, with many books and archive items donated and on loan from the McAvera & Walker Library.
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