Perth Voice Interactive

BAYSWATER council won’t bring forward funding for an arts studio at Ellis House despite entreaties from the organisation’s chair that they’ve had to cancel exhibitions in order to meet demand for art classes.

Councillor Dan Bull had moved a motion at this week’s council meeting to add $300,000 into next year’s capital works program, a year earlier than anticipated.

At the council’s previous briefing session, the art centre’s chair Caroline Friend said they’d tripled memberships over the last six years and increased their volunteer team eightfold.

“It’s an inspiring and safe venue that welcomes everyone in the local community to show art, create art and to build connections through art,” Ms Friend said.

A survey of members had shown that learning and coming together socially through art were an important part of Ellis House life, and a studio would help achieve it, she said.

“Learning and creating drives a high demand for classes and workshops,” she said. “We host six-weekly art classes and we have cut down one of our exhibitions some can run three separate week-long classes though the year.

“But we’ve gone about as far as we can go because of limitations with space and facilities.

“We can only host about eight students per class, which is not viable for those who want to teach.

“Bayswater needs a centre that is dedicated to sharing the love of the arts with the community.

“With a purpose-designed studio we can become the full-service art centre.”

Cr Bull argued Ellis House had supported local artists for decades.

Evolving

“With the strong leadership of the committee it has been evolving in size and importance, resulting tin the place needing more space to support the local art community,” Cr Bull said.

“Helping Ellis House expand its footprint to provide art service to the community while continuing to be a place for regular art exhibitions, including the important and unique opportunities it gives to emerging artists to get experience in showing their works, makes this project all the more important.

“Former councillor and mayor Barry McKenna always brought council back to its mantra of ‘garden city, quality lifestyle’, and I can imagine him saying that in order to deliver a quality lifestyle for our locals, this project needs to be part of the mix.”

But Cr Michelle Sutherland led the charge from the councillors who ultimately shot the motion down, saying the council had previously supported the studio on the belief other funding would also be part of the mix, but ultimately didn’t eventuate.

“This $300,000 equates to just about 1 per cent of our rates and we don’t have that type of money,” Cr Sutherland said.

She said there wasn’t a business case to show how the studio would make the centre financially sustainable, and felt there were better opportunities on the horizon.

“We have two elections next year… so I would probably wait until then because both parties, and I could probably also say the Greens, have a kitty of money they can open up when they need to.”

Councillor Assunta Meleca was also not in support, saying bringing the project forward meant its impact on other priority projects hadn’t been fully assessed.

“I am also concerned that it will jeopardise Lotterywest grant funding for projects that have already been prioritised,” she said.

“Whilst the proposed studio becomes another asset to the City, it also becomes a building with ongoing maintenance costs that we haven’t factored in.”

The motion was lost 6-4.

by STEVE GRANT