Women of the Borough Group: An Open Question

How many names have we lost?

The recent piece on Edna Mann's studio work prompted a question we haven't been able to shake since: if one woman's serious, sustained practice could nearly vanish from the record, recovered only through a family's own archive, rather than through any institutional account, how many others passed through Bomberg's classes at the Borough Polytechnic and, later, the City Literary Institute, and simply never resurfaced at all?

This piece isn't a settled history. It's closer to a working note, an attempt to lay out what we do and don't know, and an invitation to anyone who might help fill the gaps.

What's Documented

Standard accounts of the Borough Group settle on a small, stable cast: Bomberg himself, then Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield, Dorothy Mead. Mead's name usually survives the retelling, in part because she went on to a visible public career. Edna Mann appears far more rarely.

But the record, once you go looking, is wider than the standard cast suggests, and it points to at least four different kinds of gap , not one.

Dorothy Missen is the clearest case of a name genuinely thinned out by the historical record. Cork's 1987 Bomberg biography and later scholarship confirm she was a founding-era member of the group, and a 2020 Tate Papers essay by Kate Aspinall adds a detail that opens the door to further research: her maiden name was Bergan, before she married a fellow Borough student, Len Missen. Cliff Holden's own account of the Group's history adds one further, pointed detail: she was left out of the Group's third annual exhibition in 1949 on the stated grounds that her recent work hadn't met the required standard, a judgment made by the same small, self-selecting circle that decided everything else about who counted as a serious member. Beyond her name, her marriage, that exclusion, and her presence in group exhibition listings through the late 1940s, we currently have almost nothing, no surviving account in her own words, no clear record of what happened to her practice afterward. This is exactly the kind of gap a family archive could close.

Susanna Richmond (born Eleanor) is a different kind of case again: not erased, but folded almost entirely into someone else's biography. A fellow Bomberg student and full member of the Borough Group, she married Miles (then Peter) Richmond, and the couple left England together in 1952, first for Aix-en-Provence and then for Ronda, Spain, where Miles rejoined Bomberg. Decades later, in 1993, the two held a joint exhibition at London South Bank University, meaning she did keep painting and exhibiting into later life, but almost every trace of her that survives in the public record appears as a clause inside her husband's story rather than as an entry in her own right.

Lilian Holt (who exhibited under her maiden name though she took Bomberg's name personally, having married him) and her daughter Dinora Mendelson (later Dinora Davies-Rees) were both present from the earliest days of the classroom, not as occasional visitors but as working members of the group , Holt was one of the four artists who first proposed the exhibition that led to the Borough Group's founding, alongside Edna Mann and Dorothy Mead. Mendelson, meanwhile, is credited with recruiting several other students into the class, including Leslie Marr and Len Missen. Both left first-hand written accounts held in the Tate Archive (via the Marr Papers), which makes them better documented than most of the group's women, and a reminder that "founding member" status did not, on its own, guarantee lasting visibility. Holt in particular is on record as resenting how much of Bomberg's time and energy his students absorbed, a tension that adds a sharper edge to her own position inside the community she helped found.

Janina Baranowska turns out to be the most striking case: not a forgotten figure at all, but one whose full, prominent public career has simply stayed almost invisible within English-language Bomberg and Borough Group scholarship. Born in Grodno, Poland, in 1925, she was arrested and deported to Russia in 1940, later joining the Polish Armed Forces and reaching Britain via the Middle East. She arrived in London in 1946 and studied under Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic from 1947 to 1950, by some accounts his youngest pupil, and by her own account his favourite, crediting his teaching, including the practice of turning a drawing upside down to break its dependence on literal appearance, with shaping her lifelong emphasis on form over surface likeness. Within the separate, extensively documented world of Polish-émigré art in Britain, she was a genuinely major figure: a member of the Royal Academy of Arts' exhibiting circle, the London Group, and the National Society of Artists; a founding figure of the artist collective Group 49 in the late 1940s; founding secretary and, from 1980, chairman of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain; editor of the 1983 survey volume Contemporary Polish Artists in Great Britain; and director of the POSK Gallery in London for over four decades. Her work is held in the Ben Uri Collection, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the Museum of Art in Łódź. A 2023 scholarly survey of Polish art in Britain singles her out, by name, as one of the significant Polish visual artists whose entire artistic output has gone unmentioned in mainstream British-cultural histories of "Polish London", including academic monographs that otherwise run to hundreds of pages. She died in London in 2022.

Baranowska's case suggests the gap isn't only about women's work vanishing outright. It's also about which communities get treated as the canonical record. A full, prominent career, extensively documented within Polish-émigré art institutions, can still be almost entirely absent from the standard English-language accounts of the very classroom she trained in — and, as the 2023 survey argues, this is not unique to her: it is a structural blind spot affecting the study of Polish artists in Britain generally. That raises an uncomfortable question for an archive like this one: how many other students passed through the Borough on similar terms — prominent in someone else's record, invisible in ours?

A Structural Problem, Not Just an Archival One

The Mann research suggested a further reason names thin out closer to home, and it's worth stating plainly. The Borough Group's own culture, shaped heavily by Bomberg's convictions, seems to have carried an assumption that a serious studio practice and a domestic, family-centred life were difficult to hold together, particularly for women. If that assumption shaped how contemporaries spoke about, exhibited, or remembered particular women's work, it would help explain why some names, like Missen's, thin out precisely at the point where a woman's life moved outside the group's immediate view.

This is a pattern documented elsewhere in twentieth-century British art history. There's no reason to assume the Borough Group was an exception, and taken together these cases are a reminder that the same period could produce more than one kind of gap at once, women written out (Missen), women recorded but under-credited within their own founding group (Holt, Mendelson), women written fully into a different history altogether (Baranowska), and women preserved only as a footnote to a husband's career (Richmond).

A Call to Archives

This is where we'd like to ask for help.

If you're a descendant, relative, or estate holder connected to Dorothy Missen (née Bergan), or to anyone else who studied under Bomberg whose name doesn't appear in the standard accounts, we would very much like to hear from you. The Mann piece exists only because a family came forward with material that had never been shown publicly. We suspect hers is not the only such archive sitting quietly in someone's home.

We're not looking for finished, polished stories. Partial material, a handful of works, a name half-remembered, a family anecdote, is exactly the kind of thing that lets us start asking better questions.

An Open Project

We're publishing this now, in an unfinished state, because we think the gaps are worth naming publicly rather than waiting until we have a complete answer. Consider this the first entry in an ongoing thread rather than a conclusion. As more material comes in, we'll return to update this piece, or write new ones alongside it.

If you have something to share, or simply a lead worth following, please get in touch.

Sources consulted: Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987); Cliff Holden, "The History of the Borough Group" (2004, cliffholden.co.uk); Kate Aspinall, "Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg's Pedagogical Legacy," Tate Papers, no.33 (2020); Kate Aspinall, "Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group" (Borough Road Gallery, 2016); Dominika Buchowska, "Teaching Art in Post-War Britain: The Case of the Borough Group 1945–1953" (Adam Mickiewicz University); Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "'Permanence and Liquidity.' Polish Art in Great Britain in the 20th Century — Introduction to a Description," Archiwum Emigracji, vol. 3 (33) 2023; Ben Uri Collection and Art UK artist records for Janina Baranowska; Art UK and Messums gallery records for Miles and Susanna Richmond.

The Radical Classroom: Bomberg's Teaching Methods in Context

What does it mean to teach someone not how to paint, but how to see?

David Bomberg never thought of himself primarily as a teacher. He arrived at the Borough Polytechnic in 1945 as a working artist whose reputation had been shaped by decades of struggle, first as a member of the pre-war avant-garde, then as a war artist, and later as a painter whose mature style resisted easy classification. Yet it was in the classroom, perhaps more than on the canvas, that Bomberg's influence proved most enduring. The students who passed through his life drawing classes: Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield among them, went on to form the Borough Group, carrying his ideas forward long after his own reputation had faded from institutional view.

Bomberg's pedagogy centred on a single, often-repeated instruction: find the "spirit in the mass." Students were pushed to abandon academic conventions of outline and description, and instead to feel their way toward the underlying structure and weight of a form: its mass, its rhythm, its presence in space. Drawing, in this method, was not a matter of recording appearances but of registering a bodily, almost physical encounter with the subject. Sessions could be gruelling and confrontational; Bomberg was known to tear up work he considered dishonest or merely decorative. For some students this was liberating. For others, as later accounts make clear, his authority could be difficult, even punishing, a tension worth holding alongside any celebration of his method.

Bomberg was not alone in rejecting the academy during these years. Across the Atlantic, and in different corners of Europe, a handful of educators were arriving at strikingly similar conclusions: that traditional art instruction had exhausted itself, and that something more experiential was needed.

Black Mountain College

At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus master who had fled Germany in the 1930s, built a teaching practice around direct, sustained observation of colour and material. Rather than lecturing on theory, Albers had students spend weeks working with simple materials, learning through trial and error how colours behave in relation to one another. Black Mountain's wider ethos went further still: it dissolved the boundary between disciplines entirely, bringing together painters, poets, dancers, and composers under one educational roof. John Cage and Merce Cunningham both passed through its orbit, and the college became known less for producing a single house style than for cultivating a particular way of working, improvisatory, collaborative, resistant to hierarchy.

Where Bomberg sought a single, near-mystical truth beneath appearances, Albers's method was more systematic, closer to a science of perception. Both, however, shared a conviction that seeing had to be relearned from first principles, and that this could not be taught through demonstration or copying alone.

Camberwell and William Johnstone

Closer to home, William Johnstone's tenure as Principal of Camberwell School of Art offers a useful comparison. Johnstone championed a similarly anti-academic, exploratory approach to art education, and like Bomberg, placed enormous weight on the teacher's own conviction as a guiding force in the studio. The two men's paths crossed London's post-war art school landscape at a moment when institutions were quietly experimenting with just how far pedagogy could depart from Victorian drawing-room conventions.

What the Comparison Reveals

Set alongside Albers and Johnstone, Bomberg's teaching looks less like an isolated eccentricity and more like part of a wider, largely uncoordinated mid-century movement, one in which a generation of artist-teachers, often themselves displaced or marginalised by the war, sought to build something more honest than what they had inherited. What distinguishes these pedagogies from one another is not simply method but structure: Black Mountain diffused authority across an entire community of practice, while Bomberg's classroom remained organised, often uncomfortably, around a single dominant vision.

That structure had consequences. The same intensity of belief that made Bomberg's teaching so formative for painters like Mead and Mann also shaped, and at times constrained, what kind of artistic life the group considered possible, a tension the recent research into Edna Mann's career makes visible. Radical pedagogy, in other words, does not only open doors. It also decides which doors remain closed.

To look again at Bomberg's classroom alongside Albers's studio or Johnstone's Camberwell is not to diminish his legacy, but to place it within a fuller history, one in which teaching itself, as much as painting, became a site of experiment, risk, and occasionally recognising limiting factors. The Borough Group's paintings are the visible result of that classroom. The archive's task is to hold onto the fuller, more complicated story behind them.

Borough Road Gallery and Young Poets Network

What happens when a collection of paintings becomes an invitation to write?

Earlier this year, Borough Road Gallery partnered with The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and poet and visual artist Sophie Herxheimer to launch The Colour Challenge, inviting young writers to respond to colour through poetry. Inspired by A David Bomberg Legacy: The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University, the challenge encouraged participants to look closely at the world around them, to consider colour not simply as description but as sensation, memory, atmosphere and emotion.

The response exceeded all expectations.

We received 762 poems from 492 young poets, with entries arriving from across the UK and around the world. Young writers submitted work from more than 50 countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Ukraine, the United States and Zimbabwe.

The challenge drew inspiration from the artists represented in the Sarah Rose Collection, particularly David Bomberg's belief in the "spirit in the mass" — a commitment to direct observation, sensory experience and creative integrity. Participants were invited to explore colour through close looking, ekphrastic writing, and reflections on their own creative processes.

The resulting poems demonstrated remarkable originality and range. Some transformed colour into intimate meditations on family relationships; others used vivid palettes to explore memory, migration, landscape and identity. Across the entries, colour became a way of understanding the world anew.

The winning poems responded to six artworks from the collection:

• The Cochineal Blonde Prize — Peroxide (My Mother's Heart) by Zelda Cahill-Patten

• The Purple Waltz Prize — Purple Flowers by Nisha Patel

• The Scarlet Tree Prize — Burning Branches by Mya Shafi

• The Copper Antenna Prize — Diary of a Peacock Butterfly by Andrea Domingo

• The Fluorescent Blue Prize — I've been thinking about how I used to swim at night by Alyna Shae Lim

• The Orange Paper Prize — The Way Light Passes Through by Lauren Chung

Together, these poems reveal the continuing vitality of the collection and the many ways contemporary audiences can engage with art. They show that the works in the Sarah Rose Collection are not fixed historical objects but living prompts for imagination, reflection and creative exchange.

We are enormously grateful to The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and Sophie Herxheimer for their collaboration, and to every young poet who shared their work with us. The extraordinary number of submissions reminds us that colour remains one of the most immediate and universal ways we experience the world—and that poetry continues to offer powerful new ways of seeing.

ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk

Edna Mann: Drawing in the Studio of David Bomberg

Recently, Borough Road Gallery was contacted by Sally Baldwin, whose husband, the artist Mark Baldwin, is the son of the painter Edna Mann. Sally generously shared photographs of paintings, drawings, and two surviving portfolios dating from Mann’s time in David Bomberg’s life drawing classes at the Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s. Preserved within the family estate, these works offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the practice of an artist whose contribution to post-war British art is only now beginning to receive renewed attention.

Born in East London in 1926, Mann was described by her siblings as a “brave”, “vivacious” “lifeforce”. Educated first at Romford County High School for Girls, she later studied at the South-East Essex Technical College and Dagenham School of Art, where she encountered David Bomberg. Like fellow student Dorothy Mead, Mann was at first uncertain about Bomberg’s teaching methods, but quickly became committed to his radical approach to drawing and structure. In 1944 she followed Bomberg to the City Literary Institute and later, in 1946, to the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University.

Works produced during this period include powerful charcoal drawings of Westminster Abbey, the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral, and a striking cityscape likely drawn from the roof of the Borough Road building itself. These drawings demonstrate Mann’s engagement with Bomberg’s belief that drawing should move beyond description to capture the deeper rhythms and energies of lived experience.

United by their admiration for Bomberg, Mann, Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden and Miles Richmond formed the Borough Group in 1946, an exhibiting society that remained active until 1951. Before the group’s formation, Mann had accepted a scholarship to the Royal College of Art to study book illustration, but left after only a year due to what she experienced as entrenched opposition to Bomberg’s ideas within the institution. Her loyalty to Bomberg’s vision came at a personal cost. After becoming pregnant, she was reportedly encouraged to leave the Borough Group, as Bomberg did not believe it possible to sustain both motherhood and serious artistic practice.

Yet Mann continued to work throughout her life, combining motherhood, teaching, writing and painting. Raising three children with her husband Don Baldwin, she developed a practice that evolved significantly over time. Moving through Forest Hill, Romford, Leytonstone and Woodford, Mann taught art first at Lucton County Secondary Modern School in Debden near Loughton before later teaching at Burnt Mill School in Harlow between 1962 and 1978.

According to Don Baldwin, Mann gradually transitioned out of what he referred to as her “mud plum” period during the late 1940s and 1950s, increasingly embracing vivid colour and abstraction during the following decades. This shift is visible in works such as Bones and Roses, shared by the Baldwin family, in which structural discipline gives way to a more expressive and intuitive handling of colour and form.

1965 proved a particularly important year for Mann. Her work was included in the Harlow Arts Festival, she held her first solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints at the Drian Gallery in London — founded by the Lithuanian émigré Halima Nalecz — and she also achieved success as a writer. Having experimented with imaginative and observational writing since the late 1950s, Mann co-wrote the play The Leavers with Frank Hitchcock, Nigel Graham and Anthony Hall, which was broadcast by the BBC in February that year.

Today Mann remains well represented within the Sarah Rose Collection, yet opportunities to encounter her work publicly remain rare. The portfolios recently shared by Sally and Mark Baldwin therefore offer an important reminder of how much of this history survives within family collections and personal archives. They reveal not only the depth of Mann’s artistic achievement, but also the wider histories of women artists whose practices persisted despite institutional resistance, domestic expectations and historical neglect.

Borough Road Gallery would like to thank Sally Baldwin and Mark Baldwin for generously sharing these materials and photographs.

For further information regarding Edna Mann’s work, Sally Baldwin can be contacted at: sallyabentley@gmail.com or on 07875 104 637.

Curator Interview with Tom Sochas

As part of an ongoing programme of creative engagement with the Borough Road Collection, this piece brings curator Theresa and composer Tom Sochas into conversation around David Bomberg’s Self-Portrait.. A Franco-American pianist and composer born and raised between Paris and Nairobi, Sochas has developed a distinctive musical language shaped by jazz, lyrical melody, and Western classical traditions. Now based in London, his practice spans performance, composition, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this dialogue, Sochas discusses how historical context, materiality, and artistic identity informed his compositional approach, and how working closely with an archive collection opened up new ways of thinking about sound, memory, and interpretation.

David Bomberg’s Self-Portrait occupies a significant position within the Borough Road Collection, both as a statement of artistic intent and as a work shaped by the social and historical pressures of its time. When you first encountered the painting in the collection, what aspects of it stood out to you most strongly?

What first struck me in the piece was an apparent dialogue between this spectral, almost haunted character, with burnt colours juxtaposed onto this childlike figure. The viewpoint coming from above accentuating the innocence and vulnerability.

Bomberg’s biography , particularly his experience of both World Wars , is often central to curatorial interpretations of his work, as is the pedagogical legacy of the Borough Group. How did this historical context inform your musical response?

David Bomberg having lived and worked through both world wars certainly influenced my thoughts when it came to both the music and my interpretation of the painting. What it suggests to me is an artist trying to navigate sheltering his child-like innocence, curiosity and openness to the world in order to create art in a world filled with violence, trauma and tragedy. 

From a curatorial perspective, Self-Portrait is notable for its material presence and almost sculptural handling of paint. Did you find yourself responding to Bomberg’s painterly language through musical decisions?

The woody textures that cut through the painting were very inviting and inspiring when it came to thinking about instrumentation, which is why I chose to go for a duet between two wooden instruments, the piano, and the queen of wood instruments : the violin.

Responding to collection works through sound introduces a different temporal and sensory dimension to interpretation. Could you describe your compositional process for this piece?

My creative process is usually pretty instantaneous. I knew when I saw the painting that music would likely invite itself in easily. I wanted to create something that could blend this sense of tragedy and dread with hope and innocence. The long repeated sustained piano chords would move the harmony forwards in a stately but subdued fashion and the violin would have plenty of breathing room. First the I wrote the piano, trying to find the right chord progression to express an intricate and delicate balance between the dark and the light. In hindsight you can certainly hear some Messiaen in there which is rather fitting as he wrote much of his best work in the confines of a concentration camp, he is perhaps the master of hope. Once I had a rough sketch I started painting in the violin, this took a while and had many back and forths. In the end the melody informed the harmony and I had to go back and make changes to the harmony in order to support the melody that was drawing itself out. I couldn’t be luckier to have the great Elena Jauregui record the violin part. She is a one of a kind musician and violinist. 

Improvisation is central to your wider practice. How does that way of working intersect with a composed response to an archival artwork?

As an improviser, the chief goal is to abandon any goal and be absolutely present and listening to the moment and what wants or needs to be expressed in that moment. I think being practiced at improvisation always informs the composition process, especially in the early stages when you have to listen hard enough to the note or chord you’ve just written in a way that it may show you what must come next. It also gives you a certain playfulness that allows you to consider other musical options or to allow yourself to make mistakes, some of which may very well be the best thing you end up writing. 

Bomberg’s Self-Portrait can be understood as a reflection on artistic identity shaped by historical upheaval. Did that theme resonate with your own position as a contemporary composer?

I think the perceived theme of that self-portrait felt particularly interesting to me as an artist as, though I am privileged enough not to be stuck in a war-zone, I am very much aware of the absolute madness that is currently taking place in our world. Be it the rise of the far right, the threat of a global conflict, or the Palestinian genocide (to name only a fraction of the tragic events taking place as we speak).

From an institutional standpoint, projects such as this open up new ways of activating archive collections. How did working directly with the Borough Road Collection differ from other commissions you’ve undertaken?

This experience was so enriching, spending time with the work up close, carefully unboxing it and getting some fascinating insight into the work from the curator themselves was super special and exciting. 

When this work is encountered by audiences alongside Bomberg’s Self-Portrait, what do you hope it adds to their experience of the painting?

I hope they get through the piece without stopping half-way haha!

Looking ahead do you see this project as a starting point for further engagement with the Borough Road Collection or for future cross-disciplinary collaborations?

I would love to compose again for a piece in the collection, I’m not sure which I’d choose but I’d certainly love to experience discovering them again at the archive and sitting with more of the work in a quiet room.

You can hear Tom’s piece below

Self Portrait

Tom Sochas

Is This An Archive? On the Limits and Possibilities of the Archive

Workshop

September 19 | 4 pm-6 pm

This interactive workshop aims to discuss what constitutes an archive and how archival structures influence perceptions of cultural memory and artistic practice. Based on the notion that archives are never neutral, the workshop considers the possible uses of archives and the tensions between preservation and accessibility.

Through collective discussions, based on critical theories and diverse images, participants will be able to reflect on how archival legitimacy is granted, denied, or contested. The goal is to highlight the constructed nature of archives, as well as their relationship to knowledge production. Furthermore, the workshop seeks to highlight the ways in which contemporary artists deconstruct fixed notions about the archive, embracing its potential as a space of multiplicity and reimagination.

Some of the questions that will guide the workshop discussions will be:

What visual, material, and conceptual criteria define an archive? What is the role of archival and artistic work in these definitions?

In what ways do power structures shape our understanding of what is preserved and what is omitted?

Can an archive exist outside institutional structures and, if so, under what conditions?

The workshop will be taught by Sarah Haylett (TATE and UCL) and Theresa Kneppers (Borough Road Gallery, LSBU).

Sarah Haylett is an archivist and researcher. Between 2018 and 2021, she worked on the project Reshaping the Collectable: When Artworks Live in the Museum, at Tate (UK). In this role, Sarah explored artworks that challenged the boundaries between Tate's archives, records, and art collections. She also developed and published the first methodology for the reconstruction and reconstruction of lost and missing institutional records. As an archivist, Sarah also worked with several public and private contemporary art collections, including Zaha Hadid, the estate of Donald Rodney, and Malcolm Le Grice. Sarah is currently in the final year of her PhD, where she is investigating the creation and use of archives in socially engaged art practice. Her research focuses on how centring marginalised narratives, collective memory, and knowledge transfer through participatory documentation practices could potentially give participants agency in the afterlives of these practices.

Theresa Kneppers Theresa is a curator and researcher specialising in digital curation, user engagement, and participatory practices in museum collections. Her work explores how digital technologies can transform traditional museum models, shifting from prescriptive interpretation to collaborative meaning-making. Theresa has curated exhibitions that blend historical narratives with contemporary artistic responses, including GIFs of Paintings and Breathing in the Borough Road Archive. As curator of The David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection since 2017, he has developed digital initiatives that integrate public participation with experimental curatorial methodologies. Furthermore, his doctoral research, entitled "User Interaction in the Online Curation of Digital Collections," proposes an innovative model of networked co-curation, in which interpretation is decentralised and promotes user engagement with art and heritage.

Breathing in the Borough Road Archive: A Reflection on Art, Aura, and Atmosphere

In April 2019, the Borough Road Gallery hosted Breathing in the Borough Road Archive, an unusual and quietly radical experiment in art appreciation by CCC. For three days, visitors were invited to encounter the Gallery’s holdings not through the traditional modes of vision and textual interpretation, but by way of breath, sound, and guided meditation.

At the heart of the project was the proposition of “insufflation appreciation”: the theory that the “aura” of a painting, as Walter Benjamin described it, might be inhaled into the body. Lines, colours, textures, those elusive elements of artistic presence, were imagined as microscopic particles hovering in the atmosphere around the canvas, waiting to be drawn into the lungs and circulated through the bloodstream. The act of breathing thus became a mode of knowing, a way of metabolising art, and of encountering the archive in a visceral, embodied state.

The meditation unfolded across twelve short audio chapters, each one tuning into a different work, story, or resonance from the Borough Road Archive. The format was deliberately intimate: two to four minutes of listening, breathing, and dwelling with the collection. This slowed-down temporality felt like an antidote to the often hurried pace of the gallery, where visitors can find themselves moving swiftly from wall text to wall text. Here, instead, was an invitation to linger—to inhale, to absorb, to allow the archive to enter and circulate within.

Looking back, what feels most significant about Breathing in the Borough Road Archive is the way it reframed the act of interpretation itself. Rather than situating knowledge in the realm of the intellectual or purely visual, the project explored how atmosphere, sound, and embodied practice can shift the conditions of engagement. The Borough Road Archive was not only an object of study but also a living presence, encountered through a shared practice of breath.

This experiment has particular resonance for ongoing research into the idea of a placeless audio guide. If the 2019 project situated the experience firmly within the physical space of the gallery, the next step is to consider how such meditations might unfold beyond the walls of the institution. What happens when a collection’s aura becomes untethered from its material site, travelling with listeners as they move through other contexts? Could an audio guide create a mobile, placeless archive, one that hovers in memory, in headphones, in the rhythms of daily life?

In that sense, Breathing in the Borough Road Archive can be understood not only as a standalone event but also as a prototype. It raised questions about how we encounter collections, how they travel with us, and how sound and breath can be tools for carrying an archive into new forms of life. The work suggested that art’s aura may not be confined to the object or even the gallery, but may exist in the invisible spaces between bodies, atmospheres, and practices of attention.

To breathe in the archive, then, was not just to inhale the past but to imagine new futures for how collections might be experienced: intimately, metabolically, and without boundaries of place.

Bomberg and Ecology: Landscapes Revisited

David Bomberg’s landscapes can be understood as more than representations of place; they are sustained investigations into the vitality of matter and form. From the rugged cliffs of Ronda to the rolling hills of Palestine, his brushstrokes grasped not just the visual contours of place but its energy, weight, and atmosphere. These paintings are rarely described in ecological terms. Yet, viewed through today’s lens of environmental concern, Bomberg’s landscapes, and those of his students, can open up conversations about how art engages with land, matter, and the fragile balance of the natural world.

Painting as Encounter with Place

Bomberg urged his students to “find the spirit in the mass,” a phrase that spoke not just to the structure of form but to a deeper sense of vitality within matter itself. In his landscapes, rock is never inert, and earth is never still. Hills swell, skies churn, rivers pulse with motion. This vision resonates with contemporary ecological thinking, which increasingly recognises the agency of landforms, rivers, and ecosystems as more than passive scenery for human activity. Bomberg’s landscapes remind us that the natural world has force, presence, and its own rhythms.

The Borough Group and the Material World

Bomberg’s students took this lesson into their own landscapes. Miles Richmond’s Spanish vistas, Dennis Creffield’s urban panoramas, and Dorothy Mead’s elemental compositions all return us to questions of how humans inhabit environments. Their works can be read as explorations of balance: between structure and flux, permanence and impermanence, human perception and natural process. These concerns echo in current debates around sustainability, where the challenge lies in recognising our entanglement with the natural world rather than standing apart from it.

Towards an Ecological Reading

Revisiting these works today allows us to consider them not only as art historical milestones but also as proto-ecological gestures. They resist the idea of the landscape as a postcard view and instead immerse us in the dynamism of earth and sky. In an age of climate change, this shift in perspective feels urgent. The Borough Road Collection offers a reminder that painting can attune us to the vitality of matter, the fragility of ecosystems, and the ethical questions of how we live within our environments.

The Archive as a Site of Reflection

As we look again at Bomberg and his circle, the collection and archive become more than a repository of mid-20th-century British painting. It is a place to think with these artists about landscape, ecology, and sustainability. Their brushstrokes invite us to ask: how might art help us to see the land not as backdrop, but as participant in our shared future?