Peckham springboard

Strong bonds and shared emotions can produce great collective work, particularly if they also reference what makes a group tick: the bricolage, the experiences, and a shared history. Peckham's Garudio Studiage is a collective entity with considerable strength in personality, producing work with a wonderfully cheeky – some might say British – twinkle in the eye.

Its members were friends before they started working together. Anna Walsh and Laura Cave met at sixth-form college; Walsh met Chris Ratcliffe while studying for an MA at the Camberwell College of Arts; and Cave met Hannah Havana at the Royal College of Art. They ended up living in neighbouring houses, working together at a prop-making company, and then making their own work in a garage let for free by their landlord. Hannah Havana picks up the story. "the amazingly eccentric ageing Cypriot landlord and builder, called simply 'Jimmy'. He only dealt in cash and didn't seem to be able to read or write, but his kindness and special eye for a bargain and a quick fix was inspirational."

When money was tight, a free space was a great opportunity to build collaborative work; a screenbed once belonging to Tim Mara was purchased from an ex-RCA tutor. From there, the group with the play on the words "garage studio" started to take shape. However, a free space to work came with no heat or light, and some unforeseen additional caveats: "Jimmy kept his building materials there, and would often turn up with random things like giant sacks of sand, broken boilers and, one day, some cats. At one point we couldn't use the screenbed for two weeks, as a cat had kittens on it and screeched whenever we went near." In-kind payment was to help Jimmy with his own work, which allowed the rather different worlds of contemporary design and budget building materials to occur in the same day. As Hannah admits, "... we would never know if we would have to suddenly drop our work to help install some pipes in the local chip shop or give interior design advice for his latest renovation. This meeting of worlds and our relationship with him planted the seeds for our way of working that still exists today."

The way of working is defined by the relationships that have been building since their late teens that remains intrinsically part of Garudio Studiage's culture. "Friends before work" comes first, a philosophy extending to the group even going on holiday together. However, they work on products individually, bringing them together for shows and commercial commissions. It's an overt, a tangible sense of humour that is the thread throughout these individual works, as well as a cross-influence that comes from working individually but as part of an overall team. Their paid jobs that have included stints in advertising, fashion, and lectureships have helped to build an awareness and confidence in multi-disciplinary practice, allowing the group to build Garudio Studiage as something that Hannah calls "an outlet for creativity and enjoyment. We like to do as much as possible ourselves and this mix of skills really helps us to be able to reject conventional commercial approaches and try to be as true to our original aims as possible."

As Garudio Studiage started to take on commercial projects, it moved from Jimmy's space to Peckham's Copeland Industrial Estate, now the Bussey Building in the "Copeland Cultural Quarter". It still recalls the roots of cold garages, plumbing, and cats: "Anyone who has visited the space will be able to imagine the small transition from a broken garage to a modern day shanty town of artists, tradesmen and African Churches, not to mention spiders, mice, winged insects and a spectacular selection of 'Jimmy-like' staff. Needless to say we felt at home." Garudio Studiage now occupies two studio spaces in the building, and has grown into an organisation producing work for clients including Graham Norton, the ICA, Wieden + Kennedy, and Dazed and Confused. Their bedding into Peckham is clearly part of their character, as they are increasingly seen as being central to the growing art scene in and around Peckham, something to be shortly celebrated with their next show Nation of Shopkeepers at Peckham Space.

Celebrating the shop

It's the sense of place within and part of Peckham that has been such an overt influence on the group's work. Its social mix, its shop signs with broken English selling kitsch products, and its ability to generate randomness are what make it so vibrant and so influential. They generate a sense of playfulness that has become part of Garudio Studiage. Their often-hilarious Photo of the week frequently references Peckham life, celebrating the mundane, the bizarre, and the unintentionally incorrect. But, it's more than just these social quirks that formulate what Peckham means to the group: it's also the history, the architecture, and that innocent awkwardness seen in many inner-city areas where hastily-assembled shop frontages jar with the overt Victoriana supporting them.

It's something celebrated in Nation of Shopkeepers: large, highly detailed drawings of Rye Lane's buildings, left blank for visitors to draw their own fantasy shopping parade.

Peckham is a Place on Earth for the Box Gallery in Aarhus celebrated the area at Christmas: a cardboard cut-out model of Peckham, placed on a glittery cloud. The gallery was installed as a winter landscape with mountains, trees, rats and foxes – a double-edged kitsch celebration of the twee and not-so-twee.

Coming from their combined expertise in printing and manufacturer, the group's products have a strong spirit of playfulness, and of playing with reference and form: teatowels, lamps, and domestic homewares. Hannah cites an "iconic" aesthetic "through familiar imagery, archetypal objects or kitsch... things that people instantly recognise and relate to" with that spirit of playfulness coming from reappropriating, recontextualising the everyday.

The Lucky Skip, a handmade skip with the chance to rummage in order to retrieve anything from "high art to low humour", allowing participants to celebrate the random, the chance, and the weirdness of life. It contains screenprints and products from the group as well as others, in and amongst the rubbish – an exercise cited as a "very Peckham lucky dip". Hannah sees the piece as addressing perceptions of material value: "One man's trash can be another man's treasure, but everything that goes in the Lucky Skip is vetted by us, and many things have been rejected for not being 'on brand'... if it makes us laugh, it can go in."

The Lucky Skip, installed outside Tenderproduct

"There can definitely be a balance of high art and low humour, and part of that comes from being serious about your work but not taking yourself too seriously. We try to recognise and enjoy the absurdness of the industry, whilst still caring about making things well and keeping our integrity."

Value and volume

It is this individual perception of value that also democratises the creative process. There is a human desire to want things for less, as Hannah suggests – over the years with Ikea, G-Plan, and MFI. However, Ikea's success in global commerce runs in parallel with a resurgence of interest in second-hand furniture, with a quick quid replaced by a more measured investment. These used items may reference a different time, a different culture... a different world. But, no matter how "stylish" the item is, it's the personal relationship with the object that gives it such value, such subjectivity. "Emotional attachments to objects is inherent in human nature, and although admittedly there may be more 'quick fixes' available now than in the past, everybody has keepsakes, heirlooms and hand-me downs that they keep for a myriad of individual reasons that outlast the changes of time."

If we're seeing a resurgence of interest in items in the past, then perhaps the way in which we are buying them is certainly different. The oft-reported demise of the town centre is something that troubles the group, with "useful shops" being replaced by a smaller variety of commercial opportunities: pound shops, hairdressers and the like. Nation of Shopkeepers may provide some surprises in what the participants come up with: it will be interesting to see whether the efforts reference any "real" past developments in Rye Lane.

It is these realities, these events that reference personal feelings of both the past and the now, that are part of the group's DNA. They advocate the 'real': objects based on processes and of craft, and less of a referencing of the 'non-physical', although there is a concern of how the virtual is affecting wider society. "We notice in our students that there seems to be an increasing inability for people to talk to each other, as they would prefer to message or send pictures. There is nothing inherently wrong with being able to communicate this way, but when you see a student take a photo of something and draw it from their phone while they are still sitting in front of it, you do think perhaps something needs re-evaluating."

The group's collective strength is in this extraordinary collective personality that brings together a clutch of extremes: high art with low culture; beauty with tack; creative purity while referencing markets and commerce. Jimmy is seen with warmth as key to the group's current success: "The clash of high and low is forever at the heart of Garudio Studiage and the help of our unlikely patron set us off to places he would never have imagined."

Hannah Havana is part of Garudio Studiage.

The group has created a proto-cinematic installation within Tenderpixel, as part of the gallery's Experimental Film seasion which runs until 30/07/11.

Nation of Shopkeepers is at Peckham Space from 02/08/11 – 27/08/11.