Emerging from the Queensway tunnel and into Birkenhead, I catch the familiar ping of a calendar notification over the sound of the bus engine: my phone tells me that I am due at Convenience Gallery for the opening night of their latest pop-up venture The Town is the Gallery. This evening, and for the next few weeks, Convenience Gallery can be found in the former Marks and Spencers inside Grange Precinct, hosting an exhibition featuring work from ELLSQUARED and Sorrell Kerrison. This is the first instalment in a series of exhibitions and projects under the banner of The Town is the Gallery which will run into 2025, popping up in various locations across Birkenhead.
How do you read a gallery? How is the space created to aid viewers to witness it through the eyes of the curator or artist? What does it mean for sculptures or prints to sit next to each other? Why are the lights doing that and why does it sound the way it does? When the bus reaches the toll booths, that’s when I go exhibition mode. Taking Convenience Gallery’s invitation at face value, I begin to dissect the urban environment as if it were an exhibition.
The pieces on show are a mixture of ‘To Let’ signs next to big billboards with tattered posters for the new blockbuster to be shown in cinemas. Is this a curatorial critique of the struggle between the hyper-local and a globalised economy that refuses to share its wealth? I’m viewing these pieces on a bus, so I can’t stand and appreciate them as much as I would wish to. I’m frantically trying to build an opinion on the curation but the bus is zooming past this part of the exhibition. The next piece is a group of college kids having a smoke at the far end of the Premier Inn car park. It’s great to see durational performance art in this context.
I get off my bus as it starts to drizzle. I look up to a collage of greys and blues as a rainbow emerges, children point it out to their parents in unison. I witness this piece and write notes under a glass pyramid: a relic of the town’s once busy central shopping hub.
As I enter the former Marks and Spencers, I’m greeted by a sign-in sheet. It is full of names already, a few pages deep in fact. It’s the opening night and Convenience Gallery have teamed up with Birkenhead brewery Glen Afric to make a beer for the occasion (it’s delicious) and the Queensway DJs are providing the tunes. There’s a real sense of celebration and emphasis upon the locale and its distinct identity. We’re not in Liverpool. This Is Birkenhead. The effort behind Convenience is unmistakably collaborative. From local creatives and small businesses to Wirral Met College, Convenience Gallery provides a focal point for people to come together and speculate about what a creative-led Birkenhead would look like. The place is buzzing with energy.
The first piece I encountered was Sorrell Kerrison’s ‘Chwarae Teg / Fair Play’ (2024), a multi-artform piece that blends textiles, animation and installation. Banners with the piece’s title ‘Fair Play’ hang across the space like bunting. Their positioning provokes you to duck and shift and encourages you to interact with the space in a child-like manner. Weaving through this piece, I arrive in front of a mirror that frames me with a quilted blanket evoking memories of childhood den-building. I am being asked to discover this piece with the inquisitive energy of a child, full of curiosity. I crouch down and enter a gazebo that has lights twinkling on its ceiling. I sit on a rug and watch someone play around with an old TV. This person turns out to be Sorrell.
Sorrell and I have a quick chat about our days and how nice it is to see the opening evening so busy. A visitor runs into the gazebo and leaps onto Sorrell. This is Sorrell’s son. He’s proud of his mum and she’s proud of him. She mentions how he helped make some of these pieces today. He’s helped weave textures together as well as providing the inspiration for the work. I watch the boy run off to a light installation. Light beams from a flower and the boy immediately starts spinning the flower’s petals. Watching Sorrell’s son play encourages me to do the same. He runs off so I take his place and I spin a petal or two. I take a selfie in the mirror. I no longer witness the exhibition. I play. I become part of it.
As the night gets busier I notice a crowd of people sitting doodling by a wall covered in self portraits of everyone who has been through the old M&S doors. There’s kids and adults drawing pictures of themselves, helping each other out. These portraits are to be turned into a tea towel, primary school style – just like the one you made back in year three which were handed out at the end of year to commemorate the graduating class. This tea towel will celebrate everyone who came through Convenience Gallery’s door; a thankyou for the time spent in their pop up space. Three lads are giggling over their portrait. One of them has drawn a classic cock and balls. Another has transformed the balls into big blue eyes. The last lad has drawn a big cheesy grin under the tip of the cock. A face has emerged through the blueprints of genitalia. One of the lads notices me looking over and asks to look at my drawing. They see the similarity, I point at theirs and say I see the similarity in theirs, they laugh at each other and one says “ ‘ere this fella just called you a dickhead” to another. I let out a big bellow of a chuckle as the lads give me a thumbs up and tell me to enjoy the night before scampering off. This moment perfectly captures the playfulness of the transformed M&S. The town is not just a gallery; it can be a playground too.
Elisa Salis And Ella Matthews, also known as ELLSQUARED, wear penciled on moustaches and a strict uniform as they welcome you to “On the Waltzers” (2024). An old school carnivalesque installation full of colour and games. The pair ask if I want to play and wonder how many tokens I’d like to purchase.There is a ticket booth, behind which are a series of tufted and felted items: cigarettes; pizza; and a fish in a plastic bag. The greasy, grimey, tacky items associated with fairgrounds. I buy 10 tokens and make my way over to the booths. I stand and take in the sounds of laughter and gleeful joy of prizes being won to exuberant punters. An excited queue of people wait in line for their turn. Some older visitors clearly feeling a hit of nostalgia for past summer holidays as they enter this romanticised vision of seaside resorts. I’m shown around the carnival by one of the fairground supervisors. I spend my tokens on the hook-a-duck, the tennis-ball-dart-board, and the bean-bag toss. I accumulated enough prize tickets to win a felted cig.
ELLSQUARED demystifies art ownership and its elitist connotations by aligning access to art with a more familiar and recognisable rite of passage – the fairground. Rather than using the barriers of class and wealth to exclude people from owning art, ELLSQUARED with their tongues pushed firmly into their cheeks, challenge willing participants to a carnival game. Ownership is acquired through participation, a little bit of cunning and a certain amount of hand-eye coordination. It’s fun everyone can enjoy and my soft, fluffy cig will serve as a permanent reminder for this vision of inclusivity.
There is something that feels really distinct throughout your time spent in The Town is The Gallery. Convenience Gallery is about collaboration and municipal pride. Everything is made with people and in dialogue with Birkenhead. It’s a collectivising experience.
As I leave, the weather has become brighter. I walk behind a group who clap and shout as they walk through the Pyramids. The sound echoes around me. The Town is the Instrument. The three lads I saw earlier at the exhibition jump on the same bus as me and get off at the same stop. They chat to an older woman and make her laugh, they tell her to take care as she waves them off. The Town is the friends you made along the way. Fresh from the exhibition, the world around me appears charged with metaphor as if everything could be a work of art.
Convenience Gallery started in 2019 when two friends Andrew Shaw and Ryan Gauge began putting on exhibitions in Birkenhead market. Between June 2019 up until the end of 2022 they provided Bloom Building with their cultural programming – a period which coincided with the launch of local music venue Future Yard and artist studio complex MAKE Hamilton Square, all of which are run as a community interest companies. Programming the arts activity for the empty M&S space was invitation from arts charity East Street Arts who acquired the temporary use of the Birkenhead M&S space for artists to use as studios and exhibition spaces.
Once again an exoskeleton of a left-behind town is handed over to artists. We’re being asked to look past the years of chronic underfunding and instead view Birkenhead as a place ripe with possibility and creative opportunity. But for how long and for whom? Is this a place making exercise – a text-book example of artists as the foot soldiers of gentrification – or is this a bolder move from the town council and commercial property owners? Is the town now really a gallery? Is Convenience Gallery heralding a new approach to civic participation? Or is the Gallery a placeholder for a town pause?
Convenience Gallery gives you a glimpse of how our highstreets can be reimagined as fora for collectivity, creativity and experimentation. Real social and civic hubs.
The Town is The Gallery is the Old M&S building 22 March – 20 April. The Town is The Gallery is a series of pop-up exhibitions programmed by Convenience Gallery in various location across Birkenhead.
Josh Coates is an artist and writer based in Liverpool
This review is supported by Convenience Gallery
Published 18.04.2024 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
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