Vault Artist Studios, a Belfast-based arts collective with over 100 members including musicians, circus performers, and visual artists, has moved into a temporary hub at Bankmore House on Bedford Street after spending three years at Victoria Street and the Shankill Mission building. The collective, formed in 2017 to transform derelict buildings into affordable studio space, now provides studios for 30 artists plus a gallery and project space, with further space opening soon in a former Masonic Lodge on the lower Newtownards Road. Their first exhibition in the new space, titled 'Mayday Mayday', serves as both a distress signal and a rallying call for workers.
This move highlights the ongoing crisis of affordable studio space for artists in Northern Ireland, where arts funding is less than a quarter of that in the Republic of Ireland and half of that in Wales. Only 29% of the estimated 14,500 artists in Northern Ireland can work full-time in the arts, with many supplementing their income through multiple jobs. The collective's nomadic existence—moving from one short-term, derelict building to another—underscores the systemic underfunding of the arts and the threat to working-class artists' ability to sustain creative careers, making this a matter of broad cultural and economic concern.