Quarter Club

We initially started working together as a continuation of The Quarter Club, an artist-led initiative set up in 1988 to facilitate Manchester artists making time-based art. In November 1998, after a period of successful period of fundraising, we re-launched as Work & Leisure International with an approach to working with artists that has expanded to include commissioning, curating exhibitions, producing publications and a commitment to Manchester as a centre for the presentation and creation of contemporary art.

From 1992 to 1998 we operated from an office base at The Green Room, a contemporary arts centre in Manchester. With minimal funding and mostly borrowed resources our activities centred on creating opportunities for newly practicing artists to present their existing work. Throughout this time we organised a series of multiple artform events where emerging artists presented live performances, installations, soundworks, DJ sets and screenings of short film and video. Initially these took place at The Green Room with work being presented in its studio theatre, bar and exhibition space. In addition to working with Manchester artists we also made links with organisations such as Hull Time Based Arts, ICA, London and CCA, Glasgow, as well as with a number of artist-led projects in Nottingham, Leicester, London and Liverpool.

Between 1993 and 1997 we expanded our activity to include a series of events that took place outside of the arts centre context. T.V.O.D. (1993-1994) and The Savage Club (1996-1997) were informal evening events held in two city-centre cafe-bars in Manchester where we presented live, installed and screened works by, amongst others, Laurence Lane, Nick Crowe, Graham Parker, Owada, Phil Collins, Akiko Hada, Hayley Newman and Matt Wand. In this relaxed atmosphere artists could try out new ideas for audiences of some 100 to 200 people. For T.V.O.D. money was raised by charging a small entrance fee to cover the venue hire and distribution of invitations. For The Savage Club we received some Arts Council of England funding to enable us to raise the profile of the events through expanded marketing and increased engagement with the existing infrastructures for visual art.

In 1997 we extended our activity to include commissioning new work. In partnership with Hull Time Based Arts we presented Metropola by Susan Philipsz where the artist sang a cappella over the public address system of Tesco Metro supermarket in Manchester city centre, and Untitled experiments by Howard Matthew, a two-hour lecture demonstrating self-designed anti-gravity equipment presented in an artists' project space in the city.

At this time, Manchester still had very few outlets dedicated to contemporary art. However, other artists in the city had started to set up their own independent initiatives and we found that we all had a common interest in innovative contemporary art and a commitment to making Manchester a better place for artists. Motivated by this increased energy and ambition, and by working directly with The Annual Programme who had opened a gallery space, we were able to further explore the contexts within which we presented work, and to expand our audience within the city. With increased funding we were able to continue to commission new work focusing on facilitating artists' ideas in whatever contexts were deemed appropriate – rather than prescribing where and for how long the work should be presented.