Isabel Fallow and I have just returned from an interesting 3-day visit to Liverpool, City of Culture. We were representing Commercial Square Studios and the main purpose of our trip was to attend the National Federation of Studio provider's conference entitled What's it worth? The cultural and social value of artist's workspace

The plan on the first day was to attend a welcome supper where all participants could get to know each other over a bowl of noodles. We were taken from the newly restored Bluecoat Gallery, where everyone registered for the meeting, through the streets of Liverpool, looking forward to dinner at the Static Trading Noodle Bar which was described as being an art experience in itself. The Noodle bar was in an old containerfrom the local docks and when we arrived looked strangely quiet with no a sign of any food anywhere. A whisper went through our group of about 40 hungry individuals, huddled in th cold outside the the bar, that it looked likely we were going to be noodleless that night and it transpired the owner of the bar had been deported the night before, sadly omitting to let his customers know of his demise. So an inauspicious start really - in the end Isabel and I had to try another noodle bar, which wasn't an art experience but was open and serving food!

The conference was very interesting, especially as our studios are in an area of proposed development and regeneration and we may be called upon at some point to make a case for our survival. We heard many inspiring stories of groups of artists who have taken their destiny into their own hands and have managed with funding and support to found their own studios in a sustainable way. There was a lovely quote from one speaker, Kate Dore who is Director of Yorkshire Artspace Society in Sheffield which resonated with the audience, she said 'I'd like to see the banishing of the idea that artists need to suffer in order to be creative - in other words, the notion that artists should accept working conditions that are unacceptable to any other profession' - strong words! Anyway we've come back fired up and have lots to do now to follow up on our findings.

One lovely thing we fitted into our busy time was a lightning trip on Friday morning to see Antony Gormley's 'Another Place' - The sculpture consists of 100 cast iron figures which face out to sea, spread over a 2 mile (3.2 km) stretch of the beach. Each figure is 189 cm tall (nearly 6 feet 2½ inches) and weighs around 650 kg (over 1400 lb). In common with most of Gormley's work, the figures are cast replicas of the artist's own body. As the tides ebb and flow, the figures are revealed and submerged by the sea This installation is about 15 minutes drive from Liverpool in a place called Crosby - we managed to get a nice taxi driver to whisk us out there before going on the studio visits we had planned - he told us it would cost us about 20 quid and when we were nearly there announced that if the tide was in we wouldn't actually be able to see anything as all the figures would be under water !! Anyway we were a bit lucky as there were about three figures still visable and the heads and shoulders of a couple of others. It was a wild windy morning, very atmospheric and well worth the effort even to see just the three figures - pictures attached above.