Issue 113 / April-May 2021

Oakfield Road/Homebaked CLT
DEAD PIGEO
If anything can be anywhere then, with Dead Pigeon Gallery,
art is always somewhere – maybe where you least expect it.
One consequence of the pandemic causing
spaces to close their doors is that it’s forced
visitors and institutions to really think about
what a ‘gallery’ actually is. In one sense
a gallery is still a venue, the spaces so many of us
are missing. But as we’ve all explored how to access
artworks in other ways, it’s become clearer than ever that
the idea of a gallery also has a less tangible meaning.
There are other elements beyond the four walls that
people identify with: community, aesthetic, or attitude.
DEAD PIGEON GALLERY, however, knew this
already. Their name comes from the site of their very
first exhibition – a space in what was to become The
Tapestry but was abandoned before their takeover. It
was, in the words of co-manager Jayne Lawless, “full of
dead pigeons – I mean, full – and alive [ones] and shit.
Everywhere I looked, there were live ones in the beams
and dead ones on the floor.”
It’s to Liverpool’s benefit that the team – a threesome
which includes Catherine Dalton and Josie Jenkins – saw
the potential of the space for that first exhibition. And
when it ended, they came to the realisation that it didn’t
have to mean the end of the project. “We can take it
wherever. We can just ask for people with spaces to host
us, so we became a ‘gallery in residence’,” says Lawless.
To date, the project has been in eight separate venues,
including an abandoned pub, a terraced house and a
Texan fire station.
Their current exhibition, Dockers, is the second
to be held in the office of Liverpool Walton MP Dan
Carden. With the office currently closed to the public,
the exhibition can instead be discovered through a video
interview with photographer Dave Sinclair.
Dockers is an exhibition of Sinclair’s photos
documenting the 1995-98 lockout. Nobody imagined
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that when dockers refused to cross a picket line set up
by five colleagues it would turn into such a long-running
dispute and would, thanks to the story spreading on the
then-emerging internet, attract global solidarity. Sinclair
became embedded in events as an observer, and the film
works as a complementary piece to the exhibition, giving
Sinclair space to share his experiences and perspective.
With ongoing uncertainty around the post-Covid return
of jobs, rise of zero-hours contracts and British Gas
strikes making headlines, Dockers feels timely.
How the film has come into being typifies two of
DPG’s philosophies. It’s been shot by Harvey Morrison,
a filmmaker whose first experience of having work
exhibited was in DPG’s previous exhibition, High-Vis –
which took place in a former bakery in Kensington.
In High-Vis, Morrison’s film was shown in a sequence
beside work by Gina Tsang and Mark Leckey, a roster
that exemplifies how, while DPG take their art entirely
seriously, they’re far from pretentious about who and
what is featured.
One of DPG’s driving motivations has always been
the lack of space for grassroots artists to show their
work. Liverpool may seem spoiled for galleries, but they
haven’t traditionally been places where emerging artists
are given their first platform. Jenkins explains how, as an
artist, “you’re either doing studio shows – if you’re lucky
to even have a studio where you can have a show – or
you’re working to get an open call. Things are starting to
happen, like Output, but there still isn’t enough.”
DPG are particularly concerned with how this affects
artists from working class-backgrounds. Lawless and
Dalton grew up together around Anfield and Everton
and understand how working-class artists may face
additional barriers to exhibition, something which they
are determined to break down. “It’s not like we ask people
for documentation on what class you come from, explains
Lawless with shades of humour. “It’s just a statement of
intent with regards to people that we know don’t get the
same amount of opportunities.”
Consequently, participation in a DPG show is less
contingent on formal training and more on passion
and execution of a vision. “We put ourselves there as a
platform, where other working class-human beings have
the confidence to approach us. They go, ‘We’ve never had
a show, we’ve never put any work in an exhibition, we
haven’t done a degree, but we’re really, really into this’,”
says Lawless.
“The other thing that DPG does,” adds Jenkins, “is it
puts artists together from very different points in their
career. So, in the very first show, there was a painting by
Adrian Henri.” Such a lack of hierarchy is rarely seen in
group shows and it was certainly an opportunity valued
by Dalton, who had just graduated from Liverpool Hope
University when she exhibited in that first show.
“It’s a thing that you don’t think will ever happen
when you’re just fresh out of uni,” she says. “I went in
and said, ‘This is what I did’ and they were all like, ‘Oh
my God!’” They’ve found that everyone’s happy to be
involved, because even the most established artists
understand the value of having a significant place to
start. “A lot of the time [established] artists are just
really nice,” says Jenkins. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, I was like
that once. I want other people to have the opportunities
I had’.” The idea continues to work because everyone
involved – even Turner Prize winners, such as Leckey –
trusts DPG to curate a great show.
The word ‘trust’ comes up multiple times in our
conversation, in terms of working with both artists and
audiences. DPG want to build a relationship of trust with
their audiences, wherever the gallery is. Wherever you