Arts or Storage

Neal Campbell: Untitled, 2025, photographic print

Arts or Storage is an ongoing collaborative project between creative practitioners Neal Campbell and Jane Morrow, utilising photographic documentation, film, interviews and text to survey the conditions that studio based artists in Belfast work in. This work is vital, urgent and evolving. Belfast’s studio groups are experiencing an existential crisis – rapacious gentrification and poor planning have been displacing grassroots arts organisations for years. In 2025, this problem has reached unprecedented acuteness, with the majority of the city’s artists facing eviction from their studios by early 2026.

Arts or Storage is a continuation of the work that Neal and Jane have been undertaking independently for many years, in managing, curating, documenting and researching artists’ workspaces. The title comes from an estate agent’s brochure that Neal received in his former role as General Manager of Vault Artist Studios, boasting of a building “suitable for arts or storage purposes”.

In August 2025, an initial exhibition of the work created under this project was held at Vault’s Gallery & Project Space in Marlborough House, in what was to be the final exhibition in that space before the organisation were forced to move again. To read the accompanying essay, click here or visit Vault Artist Studios.

About Neal:

Neal Campbell is a photographer with a studio in Vault’s Shankill Mission building. He is co-founder and former chair of Belfast Tool Library, and has recently taken up the position of Cultural Development Manager at EastSide Arts, following eight years working with Vault. From Vault’s first premises in the Bank building, to Tower Street, Marlborough House, Shankill Mission and 39 Corporation Street, Neal led on the search for premises and in making those premises comfortable, collegiate and habitable for Vault’s 100+ members, growing the organisation into the largest provider of affordable studios in Northern Ireland.