Sara Marcus in Conversation with Metamorphika Studio’s Simon Ballester and Kieron Coffey
Metamorphika Studio is an art collective and contemporary arts space founded by the two independent artists Simon Ballester and Kieron Coffey. Their interest in liminal and transformative spaces led them to a vacant venue in Hackney, which they then renovated and established Metamorphika Studio as a hybrid space for bold artistic expression. Since opening, they have hosted 28 exhibitions, including public events, performances, and residencies, featuring more than 250 independent artists. Their meteoric rise has included having their work published on numerous art platforms, taking part in the London Art Fair, receiving funding from The Arts Council England, and collaborations with Goldsmiths University, The Architectural Association, RCA, and Slade UCL. MADE IN BED sat down with the two founders to talk about the origins of Metamorphika, the experience of running such a unique venture, and their plans for the future.
Kieron Coffey (left) and Simon Ballester at The London Art Fair. Photo courtesy: Metamorphika Studio.
Sara Marcus: Give us the backstory, how did you two meet?
Kieron Coffey: Simon is my ex-girlfriend's flat mate, so we met through her. They lived about five minutes away and we kind of just hit it off. That was May 2023.
Simon Ballester: Then, we started sharing a studio together in Woolwich with another artist and that's where we started to collaborate artistically on projects together.
SM: What then made you decide you were going to go into business together and create Metamorphika Studios?
SB: We just quickly realized that the relationship between artists and galleries was really impersonal. Artists were isolated in the processes of conception, production, and presentation. Artists often do exhibitions with people that they don't know, just individuals next to each other without any sense of community, and we wanted to change that. At this time, we started to look for a gallery space. We did a business plan, we found some money, and we went through all these processes. We started with a group show of 30 artists, which was huge, with ceramics coming from Switzerland and all that, because the idea was actually to create a situation for collaboration between artists who had different practices. We thought that if you're a 3D designer or a sculptor and you have some similarities conceptually in the world that you're exploring or in your research, you should have the possibility to actually come together and expand the discourse of your work.
Opening group show at Metamorphika Studio, 22/03/2024. Photo courtesy: Metamorphika Studio.
SM: In the course of having this gallery, have you found that your artistic practices have been influenced by some of the artists or artistic events you’ve hosted?
KC: I would say no, but I now know a lot more people that can help me do things I can't do myself, which has expanded my abilities on the technical applications of making certain artworks that I need help making. I would say in reverse I’ve noticed how through us, people have been able to meet others who have helped them expand their practice and have been able to develop themselves further, which is kind of like the ethos of this whole project.
SB: I think to your question I would actually say yes, quite a lot. It completely changed the personal perspective I had when I was doing art by myself or with a small collective. I am refocused in my practice and what I want to develop personally. There was a conversation we had in the beginning of this project with the team which was to shift focus towards others, and use our skills to work with others. This has taken a lot of pressure off of me because before I had this feeling that I constantly had to produce. Now, there’s a lot of things I get personally from conversations with artists that influence my practice and I have time to digest these insights from other artists.
SM: You both are artists who have now opened up a gallery space, forcing you two to become event planners and business men among other new roles. Do you feel like these new responsibilities have forced your attentions away from creating art?
SB: I mean, it goes a bit in waves, but we still produce art for exhibitions quite regularly in group shows. Kieron is currently proposing a piece for one, I did a sculpture a few weeks ago. We do have a proper show coming up, but for me, every show we do is one long art project. For me, doing this and being able to give our advice and our direction on how to install the shows and how all the pieces speak to each other is an art project. So, I don't feel like I'm missing out where I feel I need time to do my art thing. All of this is an ongoing art project.
Installation view of Always Already Elsewhere by Raha Farazmand at Metamorphika Studio, Nov. 2024. Photo courtesy: Metamorphika Studio.
SM: Kieron, I know you have a background as a tattoo artist. I saw at the London Art Fair you presented works based on tattoo conceptions and in one of your Metamorphika Studios shows, tattoos were being offered as part of the experience. Can you talk about your relationship with this artistic practice?
KC: Yeah, so before we started all of this, I would do tattooing as like a regular tattoo practice where you just do drawings and then you tattoo your drawings. Now I only really do tattoo designs based on artworks that I want to make, so I essentially sell tattoos like selling a painting. I don't do them that often, but when I do, I'm very strict in how I do them because I want to treat it a true artistic practice. I just think that the canvas is your skin and the work then is going on your wall. It's like you walk around and move in the universe with the artwork on you.
SM: What would you say is the top skill you’ve added to your repertoire now that you’ve started Metamorphika Studios that you didn’t think you had before?
SB: Curation for me, definitely. I mean, I knew that I could do it, but I didn’t have much experience with it. Now I feel that’s a strong skill that I have. There’s also another aspect of curation that’s about writing and press and all these things that I'm still learning, but curation is a broad thing, and the art of creating exhibitions and putting things together, that's I think a skill that I realized that I was actually good at it while I was doing it.
KC: Yeah, I feel the same with the curation aspect. When we did our first show, we were trying to fit 30 artworks in here and some of them were big sculptures. We just threw ourselves into the deep end and we were like, “Okay, we have to make this work.” We were setting up that show for like two weeks moving things around, changing what goes upstairs, what goes downstairs, and blending everything together. Then, we were doing the photography of everything because we had to document the show. At the end, I looked back and really thought that we couldn't have been organized any better. It was a great thing how that skill just kind of fell out of the sky.
SM: I know you offer a residency program for artists. Can you explain what this program entails and why it’s important to you that Metamorphika Studios offers this?
KC: I feel like the artists that come here experience the things that we did when we first came here. We sometimes let artists live and stay here during the residency, and then they live within the world that they're building while making art live in the space and figuring out how to fit within this area. We'll pull out a blow-up mattress and they just sleep upstairs, and they tend to unravel their universe and build their whole thing around the concept of, “I'm doing it in this space.” I think the idea for them would change if they went to another space and had like the ‘White Cube’ aspect that you had to build within. When they come build their residency here, I think it's like a creative challenge to go into a space and make art live within it.
SB: Especially for artists that are not based in London. We had this experience with Reality Photoshop, which is a collective that is based in Sofia, Bulgaria. They came for 10-15 days. They were all sleeping here, working on their art and it was good for them to wake up in the morning and be directly in the space where the show would happen in the end. We’re interested in space as potential, as space in between, unoccupied spaces, and space ready for creativity and for change. After the residency is the residency exhibition, which is the result of the 10 days of work. It’s good also to have this direct contact with their processes because we're really interested as well in discovering how each artist actually works, which connects also with your previous question of what we get from the experience when we’re not focused on producing.
KC: For us, it’s also cool because we get to build an environment so that the residency is their own. During the show, everyone comes into their world and it's not just an artwork on the wall since we spatialized the whole show. We also get to go scavenging for items for them. If someone needs, like, the tube from a carpet roll so we can build some fake trees, we go looking for items that already exist and try to be as efficient and cost effective as possible. They come with just their tools, and that's why the residency format is interesting because you make art on the fly.
An immersive installation and performance by Leask at Metamorphika Studio, Dec. 2024. Photo courtesy: Metamorphika Studio.
SM: Metamorphika Studios recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. You’ve already hosted 27 shows, have featured at the London Art Fair, and are being talked about more and more. When you picture Metamorphika Studios in 2035, what do you see?
SB: You know, I was really inspired by what I saw at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square in the kind of specific way of teaching, programming, and the structuring of projects. They explore abstract topics, have technical studies, media studies, and there's always something going on in the school. We would like to take this format and expand it into something that’s more accessible for people financially. Also, it would be great if in 10 years we could bring together artists that we've worked with in the past and expand how we collaborate with them. A good example is the artist Vesper Alexander. She makes jewelry and sculptures and we started with her in our first group show. Then, a couple months later, she did a solo show here. Then, we worked on our first written performance with Metamorphika musicians with her from beginning to end. Now, this year, we co-wrote a show together. In the future, we want a concept like this that we could repeat and continue the network cycle where we select a few artists that are interested in working with someone like her, develop an exhibition together, and give others the opportunity to curate shows and expand the team.
KC: If we had more locations, we could give other artists that have a good eye for things like we do the opportunity to run a quarterly program in one space and maybe divide it up into every four months where one artist curates and we just oversee what they're doing. We let them run the show and give them the opportunity that we gave ourselves when we started doing this.
SM: Metamorphika Studios seems to be greatly respected and understood as a haven for the experimental artist and artist collectives. How do you envision being able to maintain this community aspect while also becoming more involved in the art market as you expand your brand?
SB: It’s definitely something that we’re thinking of and also the reason why we want to expand to have different programs because we see how it can be a bit confusing sometimes for our audience. The people that come to Metamorphika for the big group shows, performances, and music are not generally the same people who would be collecting. We want to have another space to specifically receive collectors without losing the spirit of Metamorphika. We are collaborative and experimental by essence, so we want to make sure that the people that we are surrounded by and work with also share the same values, but we also definitely want another space that is more towards some kind of ‘white cube’ standard.
SM: Finally, maybe I should have started with this, but why the name “Metamorphika?”
KC: It's like the evolution of a caterpillar where it goes into its cocoon and this metamorphosis stage, then it turns into a beautiful butterfly, and then it goes away and does its own thing afterwards. I feel like we're the cocoon, the incubator. When we do open calls and an artist has a really broad and kind of generic idea, we tend to create the theme and then we look for people to fit the theme that we want to do. That way, we get to pick the artist ourselves and build the idea with them and then the caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly goes from there, essentially.
Many thanks to Simon Ballester and Kieron Coffey on behalf of MADE IN BED.
To find out more about Metamorphika Studios, follow them on Instagram.
Sara Marcus,
Interviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED