Sackler CPD Programme Study Day: Post-Medium Collecting

This Study Day’s keynote speaker is independent curator Rose Lejeune, who is curating New Perspectives, a series of contemporary art commissions that engage with Victoria Gallery and Museum’s historical collections with process-based and ephemeral practices.

Speaking on the incorporation of such practices in collections, Lejeune writes: Many artists working today do not define themselves through a medium specificity – they are not painters, film-makers, performance artists or ceramicists. Instead, starting first with an idea, they work across a multiplicity of media, utilising them often in combination, to develop and explore those ideas. Nonetheless, most collections rely heavily on objects rooted in the traditional media; the result being that, over time, we risk skewing our perception of those practices by leaving out the non-object elements of them. What then might a collection that incorporates both the ephemeral, multiple or performative and the material elements of artists practice look like?

The day will comprise presentations by curator Rose Lejeune, artist Ludovica Gioscia, art historian Dr. Rebecca Gordon and others to be confirmed as well as panel discussions with invited guests, including Charlotte Keenan, Curator at Walker Art Gallery. A highlight of the day will be a workshop by acclaimed ceramicist Phoebe Cummings and a tour of her new commission, a site-specific installation Model for a Common Room at the Victoria Gallery and Museum.

Model for a Common Room takes the idea of a ‘common room’ and its design as the starting point, exploring what activity and functions (practical, intellectual and even decorative) a common space might have, and what possibilities a shared approach to making might offer.  The room in which the work is made was formerly a Women’s Common Room.  What remains intact from that time is a fire place, designed and carved by a group of female students; a quietly radical object. The interior architecture throughout the building is covered with ceramic tiles and features a number of decorative columns.  Cummings has also researched the collection of architectural models of the University campus made at various times as the site has expanded, and a core sample taken from the ground in university square; a column of information about the landscape of the same site, extending deeper back in time. The room provokes discussion around who belongs and what making might offer us in common. Made entirely from raw clay, the work is a temporary imagining of the room, and will be added to during the exhibition through public workshops and events that invite participation in the making process.

2 FEBRUARY 2018
11.30—17.00
Victoria Gallery & Museum – University of Liverpool
Ashton Street
Liverpool, L69 3DR United Kingdom

Sackler CPD Programme members: free
£10 for non-members. Coffee and lunch included