Free Range is a special project started by the Truman Brewery in 2000, alongside Fashion East, the talent incubator for emerging designers. The project was initially to give students from outside London, in areas where the creative community may not have been as strong, the opportunity for their work to be seen by the creative industry that was building in Shoreditch and to meet peers from across the UK. The area was nothing like it is now, full of businesses, restaurants and people - Shoreditch was still a bit of a no man's land in the early 00s. This gave student groups much more freedom to create their own exhibitions than they had in their university studios. As previous exhibitor Ben Freeman put it, the early years were a very DIY experience 'kind of like a squat rave'. With the lack of hotels & pre Airbnb, exhibitors would sleep in their exhibition spaces, sadly something that would be impossible now. Throughout the last 20 years of Free Range, exhibitions have been held in lots of different spaces within the Truman Brewery, across both sides of Brick Lane.
In the past Free Range has represented a much broader range of disciplines, from graphics to fashion to product design. In more recent years we've streamlined the disciplines, the majority of exhibiting courses now from photography and fine art, with photography being the largest discipline.
Free Range takes over a cluster of warehouse spaces at the Truman Brewery for emerging artists to plan, curate and build their own group exhibitions; the opportunity for graduate artists to connect with both industry and their peers, and for the majority, execute their first show out of univeristy.