Grace Patterson
Independent Curator, Spare Room Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
Re-Flecting
What became clear very quickly was that Spare Room emerged less from institutional ambition and more from circumstance. Grace described the project as deeply tied to the realities of being a master's student: balancing work, study, rent, and the desire to create opportunities outside formal education. The gallery was not conceived through strategic planning or funding structures, but through recognising the potential already embedded within everyday life.
They reflected:
“It is a thing of like working with what you’ve got.”
I kept returning to this phrase afterwards because it seemed to encapsulate not only the practical conditions of Spare Room, but a wider philosophy of cultural production. The project exists because Grace happened to have access to a spare room, a limited time between shifts, and a network of emerging artists around them. Rather than perceiving these conditions as inadequate, they treated them as material. The gallery becomes shaped by the realities of labour, housing, friendship, and precarity rather than attempting to conceal them beneath institutional polish.
Grace spoke extensively about time throughout our conversation. Running the space alongside work and study meant installations often took place gradually over evenings across the course of a week. Openings and events were organised around the availability of both artists and the curator. What struck me was the flexibility this created. Because the gallery existed inside their home, it could function according to rhythms that traditional institutions often cannot accommodate.
They explained:
“It has to work both with my time and the artist’s time.”
This attention toward capacity resonated strongly with many of the themes emerging throughout this project. Accessibility here was not discussed solely through architecture or policy, but through labour, scheduling, emotional energy, and sustainability. Grace repeatedly framed curatorial practice as something relational and negotiated rather than fixed.
What interested me particularly was the tension between domesticity and exhibition-making. Grace described navigating the fine line between curation and interior design, questioning how work can exist meaningfully within a bedroom space without becoming reduced to decoration or theatrical staging.
They explained:
“What does it mean to show this work in a bedroom, to show it in a domestic space?”
I found this question compelling because bedrooms already carry such intense cultural and emotional associations. They are spaces of intimacy, vulnerability, rest, isolation, desire, and privacy. Spare Room does not attempt to neutralise these meanings in the way many galleries strive for neutrality through white walls and institutional distance. Instead, the domestic context becomes active within the interpretation of the work itself.
Grace was careful to distinguish this from simply imposing themes on artists. Because they are not commissioning work, the exhibitions emerge through dialogue between existing practices and the specific conditions of the space. Artists are selected not only because Grace admires their work, but also because the work enters into a meaningful conversation with the bedroom environment.
They described this as:
“I think your work is interesting for this space specifically.”
This specificity became especially visible when discussing exhibitions dealing with intimacy, bodily experience, surveillance, safety, and domestic discomfort. The bedroom setting amplifies these themes without forcing them artificially. Rather than functioning as a neutral container, the gallery itself becomes part of the curatorial language.
What stayed with me most throughout our conversation was Grace’s nuanced understanding of accessibility. Much of my own research focuses on literal accessibility within cultural spaces, considering how institutions accommodate disabled bodies, neurodivergence, and varying sensory needs. Spare Room complicates this conversation because the gallery knowingly exists within a physically inaccessible domestic building.
Grace acknowledged this directly:
“There is a deliberate inaccessibility with Spare Room.”
At first, this statement startled me. Yet as they continued speaking, it became clear that they were not dismissing accessibility concerns, but instead confronting the contradictions embedded within DIY cultural production. Spare Room requires visitors to message privately for the address, navigate unfamiliar domestic architecture, and enter a stranger’s home. This difficulty is not accidental. It forms part of the project’s curatorial condition.
What interested me most was Grace’s insistence that accessibility cannot be reduced solely to infrastructure. While acknowledging the importance of step-free access and inclusive design, they also discussed other forms of access: access to opportunities, to experience, to conversation, to networks, and to curatorial support.
They reflected:
“This whole ethos of working with what we’ve got applies to my time and our time and our schedules.”
I found myself thinking about how often accessibility discourse becomes flattened into checklists and compliance measures. Grace instead described accessibility as contextual and relational. Spare Room may not accommodate every physical access requirement, but it creates forms of access elsewhere: opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit, to deliver talks, to gain documentation, to collaborate with a curator, and to participate within a supportive community.
This does not erase the limitations of the space, nor does Grace attempt to romanticise them. Instead, they spoke openly about the ethical complexity of operating within imperfect conditions. What mattered was remaining critically aware of those limitations while still allowing experimentation and cultural production to occur.
They explained:
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
I kept returning to this phrase afterwards because it articulated a tension I have encountered repeatedly throughout this research. There is often a fear within contemporary cultural work that unless something can be entirely ethical, accessible, or politically resolved, it should not happen at all. Grace challenged this paralysis without dismissing accountability. Their approach suggested that working imperfectly, while remaining reflective and responsive, can still create meaningful forms of engagement.
Another aspect of our conversation that stayed with me was the importance of reciprocity. Grace repeatedly framed Spare Room as an exchange between curator and artist. Because the project is self-funded and unable to financially pay contributors, labour becomes redistributed differently. Grace handles installation, promotion, invigilation, writing, administration, and documentation, while artists contribute the work itself.
They explained:
“I can’t pay you, but I do everything.”
I found this framing refreshingly transparent. Rather than disguising the realities of unpaid labour within the arts, Grace openly acknowledged the mutual exchange underpinning the project. What emerged was not exploitation, but collaboration rooted in trust. Artists are invited not simply into an exhibition venue, but into Grace’s home. Keys are shared. Schedules are negotiated. Domestic space becomes communal space.
This trust seemed central to the emotional atmosphere of Spare Room itself. Despite its unconventional structure, Grace described intentionally preserving many of the rituals associated with formal gallery practice: posters, exhibition guides, opening events, artist talks, and invigilation hours.
“I wanted it to feel like a real gallery.”
What interested me here was the act of legitimisation taking place through curatorial labour. Spare Room may exist within a flat, but Grace treats the exhibitions with the same seriousness, care, and attention afforded to institutional programming. In doing so, they challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “proper” exhibition space.
At the same time, the gallery retains the softness and informality of domestic life. Grace described the openings as feeling more like house gatherings than networking events. Visitors sit drinking tea after artist talks, browse books casually, or arrive while meal preparation is happening in the kitchen. The boundaries between public and private blur continuously.
I was particularly drawn to Grace’s reflection on the temporality of the project. Spare Room exists specifically within this period of their life: this Master's programme, this flat, this room, this community.
They reflected:
“I like that it ends.”
There was something deeply moving in this acknowledgement of impermanence. Cultural work is often framed through ideas of growth, expansion, and institutional permanence. Spare Room instead embraces ephemerality. Its value lies partly in its specificity and temporality. The gallery becomes less a fixed institution and more a document of a particular social and creative moment.
Throughout our conversation, Grace continually returned to the necessity of simply beginning. Not recklessly or uncritically, but experimentally. Curatorial practice, they suggested, should leave room for iteration, uncertainty, and learning.
What I ultimately took from this conversation was a reconsideration of what accessibility, legitimacy, and curatorial labour can mean within artist-led practice. Spare Room does not offer a perfect institutional model, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it proposes something more modest yet perhaps more urgent: that cultural spaces can emerge through care, reciprocity, improvisation, and the willingness to work with the imperfect conditions available to us.
Grace’s practice reminded me that curation is not only about exhibiting work, but about constructing relationships: between people, spaces, labour, and time. Sometimes the most meaningful cultural infrastructures are not the most polished or permanent, but the ones built provisionally through trust, resourcefulness, and the decision to simply begin anyway.