When Rory asked if he could use my friend Will and I’s studio space to “put a few bits in” I didn’t give it a second thought. It was when we met him and he started to carry in large sections of scaffolding and huge torches, I became inquisitive. I have worked in proximity to Rory when I was still at university and we have shown work together in the Mushroom Works, but that was then. Having given him a hand to install one of these new pieces I was interested to learn more about this exciting project, so I invited him over to share a bottle of wine...

Narbi Price can come across as being a bit of a closed book; mysterious, quiet, reserved, possibly the kind of person you would see played by John Cusack in a film such as High Fidelity (perhaps too obvious an association as Narbi works at Newcastle Art Centre and skirts on the edge of playing the elitist shop clerk).  In those quiet moments of acerbic wit or self deprecation you can catch a glimpse of the character that is omnipresent in Narbi’s paintings; the everyman of British comedy whom Narbi references frequently.

Narbi Price: Apologies for the madness.

Damian Huntley: Ah God, nothing to apologise for.

NP: No, there is; I hate madness.

 I was a little unnerved when we interviewed Harry; here was a man who was apparently completely at ease with a chaotic self searching approach to an artistic practice.  Harry is made of stronger stuff than a lot of artists I've met, he is a lot more concerned with the audience engaging with that internal dialogue than he is with the audience perceiving his work as "finished" pieces.  Scares me a bit; I know there's a line of thinking that a work is never finished, only abandoned but really a lot of artists don't choose to abandon the work until they know the viewing public will view it as being finished.  Here is Harry, an artist who actually wanted to start the interview, this written form of the interview with a written apology for how he comes across and where he is at in terms of his career and thought process and I think that in it's self says a lot about how brave Harry is; he didn't want me to take anything out, he just wanted to add an apology.  I haven't taken much out, there's bits where we rambled off topic, and I'm not going to allow Harry his apology because honestly, I think you'll get him, I think you'll understand that this is an artist who may well be prepared and steeled against a lifetime of enquiry.

I had never talked to Sarah Blood about art before now; we'd indulged in conversations about pirates, ghosts and allotment gardening in the past, but never really about art.  We'd shared many short conversations over cups of coffee at the mushroom works in the past but none of them touched in more than a cursory manor on the subject of art.  Having interviewed a few people for the site so far I was starting to realise that it's not an entirely uncommon phenomenon; artists although often enjoying the company of other artists frequently don't talk shop.  One of the things that struck me to an almost disturbing degree when I sat down to transcribe our almost two hour conversation is that Sarah talks in near perfectly structured sentences, semi-colons falling almost audibly in place.  Sarah also talks pretty quickly, not that she rushes, she is well paced however by the time we started recording the interview we had already arrived at the subject of exposed electrical contacts on a neon sculpture...........

Sarah:  The ones that are naked will shock you.

Ryen: Have you ever shocked yourself?

Sarah: Yeah, I have.  There’s some smaller and single electrode transformers that are a lot lower voltage, a lot lower voltage and I have actually touched them just out of curiosity so I know what it feels like, it’s like someone sticking a hot pin in your finger.  Neon runs on high voltage but low ampage. It’s the amps that’ll kill ya.

How old were you when you got into art?

SB: According to my mum I was always really interested in art but up until a-levels I was going down the science route, I wanted to be a forensic scientist, maybe even a forensic pathologist and that was all I was interested in.

It could be construed as cheating by some I suppose; three studio interviews in and all have been conducted in comfortable territories and familiar grounds, two in the Mushroom Works studios where I resided for one year and now here at my alma marta, Northumbria University to meet with artist Adam Hogarth.  I didn't feel guilty about this, I'm new to interviews, I'm new to any kind of journalistic endeavour and I think it's fair really to start out in old and friendly haunts, write what you know.

I met with Adam at the print department at Northumbria

Friday June 5^th 2009 Ryen and I were relaxed, taking in the preview of "Sustainable Environments" at The Mushroom Works, sipping the complementary wine and feeling less and less apprehensive about interviewing Jim Edwards.  He appeared to be running a little late but when he arrived I felt at ease as I watched him walk around the show with one of his children on his shoulders.  Here was a man enjoying the pleasures of married life and plainly at ease with the fact that we were there to interview him.  Not so, Jim had forgotten completely that he was meeting us to chat about his work, so embroiled was he in preparing for the show.  It's nice to catch someone on their back foot, especially a consummate professional like Jim.

Jim is well known in the North East for his cityscapes and landscapes and he is also someone I enjoyed chatting with on a frequent basis in the period during which I occupied a studio downstairs from him at The Mushroom Works.  This turned out to be as comfortable and accommodating chat as I'd ever shared with Jim