In this edition of Culturalee in Conversation With, we sit down with Amy Rose, the visionary lead curator behind Undershed, one of Bristol’s most dynamic and unconventional art spaces. Rapidly gaining a reputation for its bold programming and commitment to platforming emerging voices, Undershed has become a vital part of the city’s cultural fabric. Amy shares her curatorial approach, the ethos driving Undershed, and what it means to create space for art that challenges, questions, and connects.
Prior to joining Undershed as Lead Curator, you co-founded immersive studio Anagram. How did you get involved in Undershed?
I got involved in Undershed when it was a twinkle in the eye of the amazing team at Watershed in Bristol.
Hidden behind the cinemas and the cafe / bar – the Pervasive Media Studio was started in 2008 as a supportive R&D space for those working with creative technology. I joined the resident community of artists at the Studio in 2013 with my Anagram colleague May Abdalla – and our practice as filmmakers was totally transformed through the collision with such a vibrant and inspiring place.
Being a member of the studio community for ten years meant that I knew the building and the people very well – and at the same time, the world of immersive and interactive art was growing rapidly, despite there being few opportunities to show work on an ongoing basis outside of the festival circuit.
So, in 2022, a conversation sprang up in the Watershed bar between myself, Jo Lansdowne (Exec Producer of the PM studio) and Mark Cosgrove (Cinema Curator) – and I began some research into what Watershed might do if it had a gallery for showing immersive and interactive art alongside the three cinema screens.
Slowly, we built up the ideas of what it could be and raised the funds to transform the space – and I left Anagram in autumn 2023 to fully step into my role as Lead Curator of Undershed.
You have a background as a documentary filmmaker and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with an MFA in directing. What led you towards immersive art, and how has your background shaped your curatorial approach?
Drawing together the past threads of how we come to our present path is always a complex process. I did originally train as a documentary filmmaker – making short films and working on feature documentaries as an assistant producer and cinematographer. I was interested in films that felt like a creative treatment of reality – that got into the heart of people’s lives and internal worlds with sensitivity and a bit of magic. But the documentary industry wasn’t a very easy place to be a young woman with weird ideas, and I also did a lot of interactive game design outside of work for music festivals and on children’s wild camps. That culture of resourcefulness and fun that permeates the UK music festival scene and the progressive outdoors education movement I’d been part of since I was a child (Forest School Camps) has always been a big source of inspiration and learning for me. These are open spaces of radical experimentation where you can try things – and fail – and you are forced to use simple tools for maximum impact.
When May Abdalla and I started making work together under the name Anagram, it felt like we were cooking up that sense of deep experimentation and ingenuity with the rigor and heart of documentary film. We would go to film festivals and be inspired by places like IDFA Doclab (every November in Amsterdam) and Sundance New Frontier Lab (no longer in this world) – always hunting for ways to experiment with narrative, interactivity and meaning. I worked with May for over a decade, and we made many projects that toured all over the world, always experimenting with form and mostly working with creative non-fiction.
Personally, I love the work that tries to speak to your whole body, with all its capabilities and complexity. That means moving beyond the audio-visual to involve your other senses, whether that’s the way you move, what you touch or the whole environment in which the piece happens. I’ve long been fascinated by how emotional and intellectual depths can be found through movement and sensation alongside thinking – challenging the approach to meaning-making that has dominated Western philosophy and culture for hundreds of years.
If I try to distil how these things all thread together into a curatorial approach – I would say it’s really about a combination of deep thoughtful intention alongside an experience that feels playful and accessible. Ultimately, you need both elements to actually reach people, and touch what’s going on under the surface.
Undershed is Bristol’s first immersive gallery — what was the vision behind launching it?
Undershed gathers together interactive work by renowned artists from the UK and across the globe. Artists have been making this work for a long time now – but it is rare for audiences to have the chance to build up a deep understanding of the form outside of large-scale spaces like Outernet or The Lightroom.
Importantly, Undershed is a gallery built inside a much-loved and long-respected independent cinema – Watershed. Within this context, Undershed offers audiences a pathway beyond the silver screen, and shows that good storytelling and brilliant conceptual thinking can be crafted into new artworks, with new tools.
The description “immersive gallery” is something we’ve debated many times – there’s a latent feeling in the air that the word “immersive” has been used far too much, inviting raised eyebrows and subtle sidestepping. The funding scheme Immersive Arts, which Watershed is involved in running, describes “immersive” in a helpful way – as “art made with technology that actively involves an audience”. This is the best boundary to set around a medium that is undisciplined in form and agnostic in technological approach.
We want to share work that has emotional depth. Where interaction is involved, the conceptual thinking behind the work has to be challenging the notion of what it means to participate in an experience or a story. There is no interaction just for the sake of it – no gimmicks using cool new tech. This is about quality, and experiments carried out by artists who are right at the vanguard of this exciting form.
Of course, the task of building a new space is as much about what artwork we put in it as it is about all the elements at play – what it’s made of, who the front of house staff are and how they talk to people, what the atmosphere really feels like when you step into the room. What we’re really seeking is a space that feels both playful and serious – comfortable and theatrical. A space to laugh and talk to other audience members, as much as it is a space to meditate on life and the complexities of our relationship with the world around us.
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Interview by Lee Sharrock, Founder & Editor of Culturalee
Read the whole interview https://culturalee.art/culturalee-in-conversation-with-amy-rose-lead-curator-of-undershed