You have to wonder what the neighbours think. When Richard Kendrick and David Martin turned their front porch into a temporary art gallery eight months ago they didn’t try the usual tactic of staging exhibitions around the furniture and fixtures of a domestic setting. Porch Gallery is just what it says it is; a small enclosure of wood and glass looking out at (and, more significantly, being looked at from) the driveway of their home. It has also been a performance space, a vitrine, a sculptural and sound installation, a stage, and a surface to be covered with drawings, paintings, photographs.

The constant, and defining, characteristic of these events has been the site itself. This intermittent transformation of porch into Porch has shaped all of the subsequent works, which have had to customize themselves around the space’s strict dimensions, the façade of windows and doors, and the temporal nature of each exhibition (always the first weekend of the month). Not least of these is the roundabout way of viewing the gallery. While visible through the front windows, the spectator has to travel through the kitchen and hallway to see it ‘in the round’. This depends again on whether the artist has even left the inside door open, or has subjected the viewer to peering through a keyhole or letterbox. The experience of seeing the work is broken up by the architecture and idiosyncrasies of the gallery.

Not that every artist sticks to the rules. The exhibitions creep outside the space, posted onto the exterior walls, hiding in a living room alcove or audible for several houses down. This is hardly unexpected. Rather than simulating the pristine sanctity of the typical contemporary art gallery, Porch operates in the area between private and public; it is both residential home and communal space. This is also an accurate description of the household porch in general; a place where the trappings of the outside world are stored away so as not to pollute the interior. And yet it’s not quite indoors either. Rather, the foyer works as a kind of decompression chamber, a transitional passageway into the one or the other. So are the installations, encased yet visible, to be considered works of public art? If, as Brian O’Doherty has written, “windows allow for discourse with the outside”, the porch as gallery punctures the hermetic space of the so-called white cube (not to mention suburban Chorlton). The exhibition and opening encourage the public and the artists to make themselves at home, to have a look around the place. In an area where people live so closely to one another without ever introducing themselves, Porch becomes an invitation to the casual passer-by, the postman, and the aforementioned neighbours wondering “what exactly is going on next-door?”

Chris Clarke