ANNIE MARRS explains how Merkinch in Inverness got its very own arts venue

ANNIE MARRS is a practicing visual artist, but she is also the Arts Development Worker for Arts In Merkinch. The organisation has been doing good work for a number of years in an area of Inverness that often attracts adverse publicity, but until now they have not had their own premises. That has finally changed with the opening of The Bike Shed at the end of last month. Annie talked Kenny Mathieson through the story.

Annie Marrs at the opening of The Bike Shed

NORTHINGS: Annie, perhaps you could start by saying a little about Arts In Merkinch itself?

ANNIE MARRS: It is basically a voluntary organisation that was originally set up by local people who basically wanted to have an art class in the evening where they could go to paint and draw. That was six or seven years ago, and from that beginning they developed to the point where they wanted an Arts Development Worker, and they put together a proposal and got funding for that.

That is the post I have now, and as an organisation we work closely with Merkinch Partnership. We look after several groups that meet in the area, and our work is targeted at people who live here. We have an Art Group, an all-ages Theatre Group who have junior and senior groups, and an adult Ceramics class, which is mainly targeted at women.

Those are our regular groups, and then we run a variety of other workshops, shows, performances, and exhibitions. The main idea is that people living in Merkinch can access the arts on their doorstep, without having to travel and without having to pay out substantial amounts of money.

NORTHINGS: Where have your activities been based until now?

ANNIE MARRS: I’m based in Merkinch Enterprise, where I basically have a desk, and most of our work has been done on what is virtually an outreach basis. We have done things in the local primary school, we used to run classes in the Janny’s Hoose when that was going, the Merkinch Community Centre, the High School, mp33 – basically the idea has been that we have gone out and put things on at other venues, usually with an associated cost to us. Now that we have our own venue, we are moving all our groups into that space.

NORTHINGS: Okay, so why is it called The Bike Shed?

ANNIE MARRS: Good question! It used to Macintosh’s Motorcycles in Grant Street. We first used it for our summer festival in 2005. It is basically a shed, a stone outbuilding. We always called it the motorbike shed. Then mp33, which is run by Highland Council, took it over and got the lease for it.

They did a lot of work putting in heating and lighting and toilets and so on, and they called it The Bike Shed, so we have retained the name, and local people know where it is. We did toss around some arty alternatives for a while, but eventually decided to go with the name that everyone already knew it by.

NORTHINGS: And how did Arts In Merkinch get hold of it?

ANNIE MARRS: Well …. There was a problem with the roof, and in our summer festival this year we had it for the week with all the thunderstorms, and we literally had six people brushing the water out to let us go ahead. Highland Council hadn’t been using it a great deal anyway, and decided that they didn’t want to replace the roof, so they would give up using it.

We decided to have a wee look at it and try to see what the problem was, which turned out to be a broken down pipe that was flooding the building. We fixed that ourselves, and it’s been pretty much dry. The recent snow melt revealed another couple of wee leaks, which we are fixing. So we have taken on the lease from the landlord that Highland Council gave up.

Opening of The Bike Shed

NORTHINGS: And what do you get for your money?

ANNIE MARRS: It’s almost a white box inside. We have tried to keep it as one big room – we have a wee reception area and a bit for making tea and coffee and a sink, and a wee bit of storage space at the back, but basically it is a clear space about 11 metres by 6 metres for workshops and whatever else.

Our plan is to have artwork or exhibitions on the walls all the time, and use the floor space for workshops and activities. We would like to react to demand. Rather than just putting things out there and having nobody come, we will try to react to people coming to us and asking for particular classes and so on.

We will see how it works out once we are up and running, but our plan is that when we are not running our local classes we will let the space out to artists from across the Highlands to come and use it. We hope it will develop as a kind of creative hub that things can grow from.

NORTHINGS: Do you have much in the way of equipment?

ANNIE MARRS: No, it’s basically an empty room. We have some tables and chairs and some basic framing equipment that was donated to us, but we don’t have any big equipment, so it is a case of people bringing in what they need.

NORTHINGS: Are local artists involved in running the classes?

ANNIE MARRS: Our weekly tutors are all local to the Inverness area rather than Merkinch itself, and Eden Court are doing some drama workshops for kids on the last Saturday of each month. The classes themselves are very much aimed at the people of Merkinch, but when we are looking at letting it out to artists or artists’ groups, it would be potentially more of a Highland-wide thing.

Launch Night at The Bike Shed

NORTHINGS: So it is a community project at its heart, but with aspirations to be more widely used as well?

ANNIE MARRS: Absolutely. The community activity is very much at the core of what we are, and everything else will have to fit around it, but I know myself as a practicing artist how little space is available in Inverness, and especially cheap space.

We have a plan to offer a 24-hour let at £20 per day, so if you are an artist and want a space to produce a specific piece of work, you can hire it for a couple of days inexpensively, and you can come in and get on with it. It has a concrete floor and we have mops, so you won’t have to worry about making a mess as you might in a community centre or school or whatever.

Equally, we would like to be a place where an artist can show a piece of work, even if they just want to hire it for a day and show something that they have been working on.

NORTHINGS: Does it have potential as a performance space?

ANNIE MARRS: I hope so. The concrete floor is a problem for dance, for example, but we are hoping to bring in some performance shows. We a have a puppet show coming here in April, for example, and John Burns has been thinking of maybe doing a bit of stand up comedy. We haven’t had it formally assessed yet, but we hope to be able to seat about 45-55 people in the space. We don’t have lights or sound equipment, though.

Activities at The Bike Shed

NORTHINGS: And how tight a squeeze was it to be ready for the scheduled opening on 28 January?

ANNIE MARRS: If you had asked me a fortnight beforehand I don’t know how confident I would have been, but it has been amazing how many people offered help in getting things done ahead of the opening, and the contractors have done a fantastic job. We exhibited work by Bette McCardle, who has been involved with Arts In Merkinch since the beginning, and some photographs by Paul Marrs, who happens to be my dad! And we invited all those who came along to paint a ceramic tile, which we will use in the toilets.

We invited Bette and Brian MacLeod, who was the community worker when the art project started in Merkinch, to do the formal opening. Right back at the beginning of Arts In Merkinch they had the concept of a kind of creative hub in mind, so here we are finally getting there.

NORTHINGS: And you have the advantage of not launching into a vacuum as a completely new entity – you already have a public out there.

ANNIE MARRS: We do, and having used the venue for our summer festivals, it is know as a place where arts activities happen. We had something like 60-odd amateur artists showing at our last exhibition, so that interest is already there. The new part of it will be seeing how artists decide to make use of it.

NORTHINGS: Your own most recent public work as an artist was the knitting project with Jen Cantwell at the Re-Imagining The Centre event in Inverness last September. Are we going to see some guerrilla knitting in The Bike Shed?

ANNIE MARRS: There might be at some point! We got some great feedback from that project, and we were delighted with how positive the public in Inverness are becoming toward art interventions in their daily lives, which is very encouraging.

The Bike Shed is situated at 23 Grant Street, Merkinch.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2010