When Sarah Perks was a teenager growing up in Manchester, she would tell her parents she was going to the Cornerhouse, when she was really off drinking underage in the gay village. But by the time she was 24, she was working at the independent cinema and gallery, first as education officer, rising to artistic director of visual art and film six years ago.  Now, 37, she is about to take on her biggest challenge yet as artistic director of visual art at Home, Cornerhouse’s much bigger, more ambitious successor, in a merger with the Library Theatre Company. Due to open next April, this £25m cultural centre will be the biggest arts complex outside London, with two theatres, five cinema screens and a large gallery – Perks’s new playground.  Just five minutes walk from the Cornerhouse, opposite the site of the former Hacienda nightclub, Home aims to be a friendlier, less labyrinthine counterpoint to the Barbican and the South Bank Centre.  The brainchild of Manchester city council, the venue is part of Greater Manchester’s attempt to become a global centre for arts, media, science and sports. It lines up alongside Salford’s Media City, independent TV studios the Sharp and Space projects, the under-construction Graphene Centre, a materials research hub, and development around Manchester City’s ground.  Touring the Home site last week in a hard hat and yellow wellington boots, Perks seemed quietly excited about the challenge ahead, as she showed off the reinforced beams in the gallery, which are designed to be able to support anything up to the weight of a Mini. She plans to use the space as a showcase for emerging international artists, commissioning new work rather than loans form other galleries.  “I think it’s vital we don’t do blockbuster shows,” she said. “Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth are doing a very good job of that already. That’s not the sort of work I’m interested in anyway. I feel like our work should be in the here and now. It’s vital we keep alive the independent spirit of the Cornerhouse. I want to put on work that is accessible and challenging – the two things don’t exist in a dichotomy.”  Perks is refreshingly upfront about her accomplishments, whether getting 98% on the 11+ to get into Urmston Grammar, in Greater Manchester, lecturing in art at the Shena Simon college (now Manchester College) aged just 21, or her recent appointment as professor of visual art at Manchester Metropolitan University. “I’m one of the youngest professors in the country in any discipline,” she said proudly, adding: “Plus, I’m a woman, which may or not be newsworthy.”  She developed an interest in art from an early age after her mother, a science fiction writer, took her to see the pre-Raphaelites at Manchester Art Gallery and plays at the Royal Exchange. She didn’t take GCSE art, finding the subject dull – “it was all just drawing” – but educated herself instead via late-night viewings of foreign films. During her teenage years, she made a half-hearted attempt to become a pop star, seeing herself as Manchester’s answer to Nina Persson from the Swedish band The Cardigans.  Perks is relentless in her pursuit of artists she admires, wooing them for years if she really wants them (“I’m a very patient person – you have to be.”). She’s trying to lure Texan video artist Ryan Trecartin, described by the Guardian’s art critic, Adrian Searle, as a “cross-dressing Harold Pinter”, and would love to see Pedro Almodóvar and Lars von Trier (“perhaps against my better judgment”) experiment at Home.  Perhaps her most high profile commission was Jeremy Deller’s Procession, produced in conjunction with the Manchester International Festival, which saw a steel band play Joy Division songs as a ramshackle parade of Big Issue sellers and boy racers marched through Manchester city centre. In 2011, she set up Cornerhouse Artist Film, the UK’s leading specialist producer and distributor of artist feature film, kicking off with Self Made, the directorial debut of Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing.  Perks’s dream job is to be given the keys to Documenta, the hugely influential contemporary art festival that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.  Curating in Manchester is arguably good training for one of the art world’s biggest gigs. “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” said Perks: “ I think Manchester audiences up for it, but they are really varied – you get people stumbling in by mistake as well as those who are really clued-up aficionados. You get an accidental audience here, whereas if you do performance art in London it would be very much the visual art crowd.”  Mancunians aren’t shy with their feedback, she said. “People might not speak up so much in London, maybe because they don’t have that same passionate feeling of belonging, whereas audiences here will shout at me or stop me in the bar – nine times out of 10 because they enjoyed something, but also to tell me if they think something’s crap or to ask ‘what’s this performance art nonsense?’ I don’t mind. You have to listen and take it and talk to people otherwise you live in a bubble and are led by reviews in Frieze magazine.”
The head of Manchester’s new international art hub Home on her plans to pull in the likes of Lars von Trier