Interview: Tom Godfrey

Nottingham’s art scene has changed since 2010 when Tom Godfrey moved to Glasgow to pursue an MA. The first reforming event was the closure of Moot, the art group that Godfrey founded with three fellow Nottingham Trent fine art graduates in 2005. Dissatisfied with the limited scope of Nottingham’s art galleries at the time, the four graduates started their own gallery in Sneinton that was big on ambition and low on budget. After five years, the project had run its natural course and dispersed. Yet into the breach came other young art groups who, inspired by Moot’s DIY approach, started up their own galleries and studios: Bohunk, Backlit, Trade, Tether and others. Elsewhere, existing galleries evolved. And, in 2012, Primary studios and exhibition space opened in a former school on Ilkeston Road, providing space for some of the artists who had left the redeveloped Oldknows studios.

Godfrey never thought he would return to work in Nottingham, but he was wrong. This year he opened his own modest gallery in the former caretaker’s flat at Primary, which is already on its fourth exhibition. He has also become the new manager of Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery, taking over from painter Geoff Diego Litherland. And, just a few months ago, Godfrey’s talents as an artist and curator were recognised by the Arts Council when it purchased his poster project titled Keep Floors and Passages Clear. Taking the name from an ‘elf and safety poster by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents that was originally shown in One Thoresby Street, Godfrey commissioned twenty artists over two years to produce their own identically sized and mounted poster images.

The complete portfolio of images - some photographic, some cartoonish, some abstract - was shown at One Thoresby Street and then at White Columns gallery in New York. The Arts Council’s purchase this summer means that the artwork is included in a database of art available for exhibition anywhere. “It came out of the blue,” he says. “I just got a message saying that the Arts Council wanted to see some people, including me and the gallery. They didn’t give away a lot at the time, but they got in touch again to say they really wanted to buy it. That single sale benefited 21 individuals, or 25 if you count collaborations. It was an incredibly brilliant moment.”

Marbled Reams is Godfrey’s other collaborative project in which multiple artists were asked to produce an A4-sized image to be photocopied into a ream where one edge is marbled like a Victorian book. This exploration of the expressive potential of blank paper is partly motivated by a play on words since Godfrey was interested in how easily the words can be misread as Marble Dreams. Like Keep Floors and Passages Clear, Marbled Reams is a clean, compact artwork; aesthetic values which also extend to Godfrey’s well-lit and thoughtfully designed little gallery, TG.

Unlike Moot, TG is a commercial gallery, although this aspect is discreet to the point of invisibility. “That’s often the way with commercial galleries these days,” says Godfrey. “You ask for a list and you understand from the way in which the gallery presents itself that this stuff is for sale.” Like Moot, TG is being run on a shoestring (Godfrey is some way from generating a salary, and is hoping to stretch an initial Arts Council grant from eighteen months to two years). And, like Moot, TG is mostly dedicated to showing artworks by people from outside Nottingham. But, says Godfrey, in general TG is “a model that moves on from where Moot left off in terms of commerciality.”

With Moot and Nottingham behind him, why did Tom Godfrey come back here? “Necessity. It was first because we [him, his wife and daughter] had to move out of Glasgow since the landlord sold the flat we were in. And then I got offered a job with Nottingham Contemporary as a technician on the regular team so I knew that was four three-week stints every year, which covered my rent. I pieced together other stuff and suddenly we could move here again. It was a surprise, but I quickly realised it was a good thing; Primary had opened when I was away and enough had changed so that Nottingham felt unfamiliar. I suddenly felt like an outsider. Thoresby Street was run by different people and all these new groups had started.”

Godfrey feels that Nottingham has changed so much in the past decade that he wouldn’t have been able to open a gallery like TG when he first left NTU. To some extent, the changes in the art-seeing landscape, with Nottingham now supporting galleries of all sizes, was arguably made possible partly by the example of Godfrey and his peers at Moot - Candice Jacobs, Matt Jamieson, Tristan Hessing. Godfrey won’t take credit for this but he does say, “We made it look achievable and not such a scary thing; that you could say, ‘can we have this building?’ and negotiate something.”

Yet, for little independent galleries, audiences can remain small. Godfrey remarks that it is not worth staying open more than three days a week at present since so few casual visitors come during the week. TG, like many other independents, can’t afford to be open all the time and even when it is open, access can only be gained via that annoying portal accessory, the buzzer. Godfrey says he isn’t bothered by small visitor numbers since he knows the gallery’s name is already known “far and wide.”

But wouldn’t he still rather have lots of people coming into his gallery? “Of course, but I don’t get paid and Josh [his assistant] doesn’t get paid, it’s just the artists who do. We run this on nothing so we do as much as we can using social media. But there’s no exclusivity against the general public whatsoever. At the same time, I’m based in a building where there’s no passing trade, you have to come into the building to find our room, and you have to ring a bell.” He adds, “I understand that that’s really infuriating and I have a friend who doesn’t go into any gallery with a buzzer. He hates that. And I do. I bet loads of art spaces would love to have a city centre shop front. Primary’s intention in the future is to be open all the time and be more accessible. But they have to spend a lot of money on a system to do that.”

TG’s latest exhibition, Grains, by Alison Lloyd, can be seen until Saturday 1 November.

TG Gallery on the Primary website