The Royal Standard is an artist-led gallery, studios and social workspace in Liverpool.

Through a dynamic and challenging gallery programme that brings together local, national and international artists, we aim to showcase the most exciting, innovative exhibitions and events that we can, working with the most outstanding recent graduates and emerging artists as well as more established practitioners and other artist-led initiatives.

The Royal Standard is dedicated to promoting exchange, dialogue and experimentation, providing a supportive and critically engaged environment to work in, and acting as a social hub for our studio membership of 27 artists, as well as the wider cultural community. Our multi-purpose project space offers a testing ground for artists to push their ideas in new directions, and a setting for more spontaneous events and activity happening independently to the main gallery programme.

The Royal Standard was established in 2006 by four Liverpool-based artists in response to the need for a new artist-led organisation that would operate somewhere in between the city’s grass-roots DIY initiatives and the more established arts institutions. Originally housed in a former pub in Toxteth, in 2008 The Royal Standard undertook an ambitious relocation and expansion into a larger industrial space on the Northern periphery of the city centre, relaunching to acclaim for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial.

The Royal Standard is currently run by a team of four to six directors, with a new team appointed on a two-year rolling basis, enabling the organisation’s ideas and energy to remain fresh and continuing to offer opportunities to new groups of emerging artists. The current directors of The Royal Standard are:

Hamish McLain b. 1983 in London graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores Universtiy in 2005. Hamish\'s practice explores drawing and painting and the influence of the working methods of film and music upon this alongside the elements of texture and his own mark making within compositions. In 2007 Hamish took part in Open-Here a collaborative residency in Munich and had his first solo exhibition Shifting Perspectives earlier this year at the Cloisters in Central London.

Jemma Egan b. 1982 in Liverpool, graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores Universtiy in 2005. Originally a member of Redwire studios, Jemma was selected for Next Up at The Bluecoat in 2008 and MISCELLANY at Outlet in Manchester in 2009 alongside exhibiting as part of Art Transpennine 08, and was also selected for an emerging curators trip to the Instanbul Biennial in 2007. Jemma\'s work is underpinned by a strong observational quality and is usually deceptively sharp, humorous and playful.

Kevin Hunt b 1983 in Liverpool, graduating with a BA in Fine Art from the North Wales School of Art & Design, Wrexham in 2005 where he is now a part-time visiting lecturer. He works at Tate Liverpool on their gallery education team alongside various freelance education, curating and writing projects, regularly contributing to a-n magazine.  He makes sculpture using found, redundant objects, particularly furniture which is reconfigured into brittle, precarious, visually unstable or inherently flawed structures that often have the ability to evolve after they have been realised.  Recent exhibitions include Dumb Objects at Wolstenholme Projects in Liverpool and Contemporary Art Manchester\'s inaugural exhibition Trade City at the CHIPS Building in Manchester.  He has been selected for Rendez-Vous 09 at the Institut d\'art contemporain during this years Xth Biennale de Lyon, in France.

Laurence Payot was born in Metz, France, in 1981, and graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and was selected for a British Council residency in Libya in 2007. She regularly works on commissioned and participatory projects and has recently received two Arts Council Awards to create temporary public works, aiming to surprise the viewer by altering mundane objects and phenomena in unexpected locations.