A sprawling former industrial warehouse on Victoria Road in Marrickville has been converted into Sydney's largest artist-run studio complex, providing affordable workspace for 65 artists, makers, and creative businesses at a time when Sydney's studio space crisis threatens to push the city's creative community to the margins.
The Foundry Collective, which opened in December, occupies 2,500 square metres across two levels of a building that previously housed a cardboard box manufacturer. Studios range from compact 15-square-metre spaces suitable for painters and illustrators to large 80-square-metre workshops for sculptors, ceramicists, and furniture makers. Monthly rents start at $350 — less than half the market rate for comparable space in the Inner West.
"Sydney has been haemorrhaging artists for years," says co-founder Lena Park, a sculptor who was herself priced out of her previous studio in Redfern. "Every time a warehouse gets rezoned for apartments, 20 artists lose their workspace. We wanted to create something that couldn't be easily taken away."
The Foundry's lease runs for 15 years, secured through a partnership with Marrickville property group Zest Capital, which agreed to below-market terms in exchange for the cultural activation the studios bring to the precinct. The City of Canterbury-Bankstown provided a $200,000 fit-out grant.
Shared facilities include a woodworking shop, a ceramics kiln room, a digital fabrication lab with laser cutters and 3D printers, and a ground-floor gallery space that hosts monthly exhibitions open to the public. The first show, featuring work by all 65 studio holders, drew 1,200 visitors on opening weekend.
The Foundry's tenant mix reflects Marrickville's creative diversity: Aboriginal textile artist Lucy Simpson (of the Yuwaalaraay people) works two doors down from a Korean-Australian ceramicist, across the hall from a collective of industrial designers and a children's book illustrator. "That cross-pollination is everything," Park says. "You can't plan it — you just create the conditions for it."
Applications for the studio waitlist are now open, with priority given to First Nations artists and those who have recently lost studio space. "This is a lifeline," says painter Marcus Wainwright, who spent six months working from his Newtown apartment before getting a Foundry studio. "Sydney can't call itself a creative city if it doesn't give creators somewhere to create."