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?

Abstract Expressionism: New York’s Bold New Voice, 1940s–1960s

In the years following the Second World War, a group of artists working in New York City transformed the art world. Abstract Expressionism, as it came to be known, was the first major art movement to emerge from the United States, shifting the centre of the art world from Paris to New York and redefining what painting could be.

Breaking Boundaries

The movement produced works that were large, gestural, and abstract. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston abandoned traditional composition. Instead, they embraced dynamic marks, expansive canvases, and, in the case of Pollock, the physical act of dripping and pouring paint directly onto the floor.

Though often referred to as “Abstract Expressionism,” the style was deeply influenced by Surrealism. Many European Surrealist artists had fled to America during the war, bringing with them ideas about tapping into the subconscious and the importance of gesture. These ideas were amplified into something entirely new in the hands of the New York artists.

Critics were instrumental in shaping how this work was understood. Clement Greenberg focused on painting’s formal qualities, seeing it as the next step in the evolution of modern art. Harold Rosenberg, on the other hand, emphasised the drama of the creative act itself, describing these paintings as “an arena in which to act.” This debate—sometimes called “Green Mountain vs Red Mountain”—revealed the richness and controversy of this new movement.

A New Name and Global Impact

The term “Abstract Expressionism” had first been used to describe Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings after the First World War, but it was New Yorker art critic Robert Coates who applied it to these American painters in 1946. The artists themselves were sometimes called “The Irascibles”—a nod to their rejection of traditional exhibition policies—but the name never stuck.

Exhibitions such as A Problem for Critics (Peggy Guggenheim, 1945) and The New American Painting (1958–59) brought these works to wider audiences. The latter, in particular, introduced European viewers to this bold American style, cementing Abstract Expressionism’s status as a global force.

Abstract Expressionism and the Borough Group

During the years when David Bomberg and his students—later known as the Borough Group—were developing their own approaches to painting, Abstract Expressionism remained largely unknown in Britain. It wasn’t until The New American Painting toured Europe that artists and audiences here encountered these New York painters.

Yet, despite this separation, art historian Richard Cork notes an intriguing resonance: Bomberg’s mid-century work “parallels the Abstract Expressionists’ emphasis on bodily rhythms and gesture, especially in the work of Pollock and de Kooning. Although Bomberg would not have been aware of contemporaneous developments in American avant-garde painting…”

This parallel highlights how, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, artists were responding to the same post-war context—turning to the body, gesture, and a search for authenticity in painting. Abstract Expressionism may have redefined the art world on a global scale, but the Borough Group shared its commitment to painting as a vital, physical act.

The Independent Group: Challenging High Art, 1952–55

In the early 1950s, a group of artists, critics, and designers gathered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London to discuss a question that would shape British art for decades to come: how should art respond to popular culture?

The Independent Group, as they became known, met regularly between 1952 and 1955. Its members included artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull, alongside critics and thinkers such as Laurence Alloway, Peter Reyner Banham, and Toni del Renzio. United by curiosity rather than a single aesthetic approach, they were described by fellow artist John McHale as “a small, cohesive, quarrelsome, abrasive group”—and they liked it that way. As del Renzio recalled, “it was very hard for anybody else to get in even if they wanted to.”

The ICA itself, founded in 1948 under the presidency of Herbert Read and chaired by Roland Penrose, had already established itself as a hub for progressive debate and experimentation. The Independent Group thrived within this environment, holding lectures and discussions that rejected the division between “high art” and popular culture. They were fascinated by cinema, science fiction, comic books, and the rapid influx of American mass media, seeing in these sources a creative energy that traditional fine art often overlooked.

This embrace of popular culture was most clearly expressed in their exhibitions, notably Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, 1953) and the seminal This Is Tomorrow (Whitechapel, 1956). Paolozzi’s collages, made from magazine cuttings and mass media imagery, anticipated what would later become known as Pop Art, paving the way for Hamilton’s own iconic works of the 1960s.

The Independent Group and the Borough Group

Although the Independent Group and the Borough Group were contemporaries, their interests were very different. The Borough Group, led by David Bomberg and including artists such as Dorothy Mead and Cliff Holden, was rooted in painting as a fine art discipline. Bomberg’s emphasis on form, movement, and direct expression reflected a belief in the enduring value of painting as a medium of truth and vitality.

The Independent Group, by contrast, was as interested in images found in glossy magazines as in paintings hung on gallery walls. They questioned the very boundaries of art and culture, asking whether mass-produced media might be just as valid a source for creativity as oil paint or bronze.

Both groups, however, shared a spirit of experimentation and a desire to question the status quo. Where the Borough Group rethought painting for a post-war world, the Independent Group opened the door to a new visual language that embraced everyday life. Together, they form two distinct yet complementary strands of Britain’s rich post-war art history.

Tracing the Double Figure: Clémence Hémard-Hermitant’s Digital Encounter with Dorothy Mead By Theresa Kneppers, Curator

Clémence Hémard-Hermitant’s recent digital residency with A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection offered a deeply personal and radical engagement with the archive. Responding to the work of Dorothy Mead, an artist whose singular voice was shaped by post-war British modernism, Hémard-Hermitant has produced a body of digital drawings that explore the intersections of caregiving, motherhood, and feminist resistance.

For Hémard-Hermitant, this residency marked a shift. Known for her gestural work with oil pastels, chalk, and ink, the artist approached the archive under altered circumstances: the birth of her second child had changed both the constraints on her time and use of materials. Turning to digital tools, she asked whether the texture, movement, and embodied energy of traditional mark-making could be meaningfully translated through an iPad screen. The result is a series of quietly powerful images that echo Mead’s expressive figures and emotive palette while speaking to the rhythms and ruptures of maternal life.

What emerged from Hémard-Hermitant’s time in the archive was an unexpected kinship with Dorothy Mead, not only in visual language but in spirit. Mead’s refusal to conform, her uncompromising stance against gendered expectations (famously declining to take a course at the Slade, forfeiting her diploma in the process), resonated strongly with Hémard-Hermitant. “She challenged traditional roles,” the artist notes, “and as both an artist and a mother, I find that challenge still very real and relevant today.”

Drawing from works such as Standing Female Figure (1962), Reclining Nude, and Self Portrait (1963), Hémard-Hermitant began to reflect on the cyclical journey of the female body: solitude, pregnancy, birth, caregiving, return. Repetition became a compositional strategy, with many of her digital drawings featuring mirrored or doubled figures: motifs of care, interdependence, and transformation.

“I was particularly inspired by how Dorothy Mead often suggested figures in her paintings,” she reflects. “I’ve been thinking deeply about how the body becomes a vehicle for care—not only in motherhood but in how we attend to others, young and old.” This led Hémard-Hermitant to use her own body as subject, turning toward self-portraiture for the first time in her practice. In doing so, she connects with Mead’s own exploration of the self, layering contemporary experiences of maternal identity over modernist expressions of form and gesture.

Despite its unfamiliarity, the digital medium offered a compelling, if occasionally unsettling, way of working. “It replicates the medium well,” Hémard-Hermitant explains, “but you don’t get the same energy release as you would with paper.” This tension between the immediacy of digital tools and the emotional resonance of physical mark-making infuses the residency work with a particular kind of intimacy. The digital figure, rendered with delicacy and nuance, still carries the weight of lived experience.

This project sits within a growing movement of feminist digital practice, one that reclaims archives not only as sites of historical knowledge but as spaces for situated reflection and care. By engaging with Mead’s legacy through the lens of her own maternal experience, Hémard-Hermitant opens up new ways of thinking about female creativity, refusal, and endurance.

What does it mean to inhabit an archive? Not just to interpret its contents, but to live through them, shape them, and be changed by them? In this residency, Hémard-Hermitant offers one compelling answer: a practice rooted in attention, textured by care, and charged with the quiet persistence of the double figure.

You can see the full body of work here.

Neo-Romantics: Vision, Landscape, and the British Imagination

Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, a group of British artists found themselves turning inward—toward the haunted countryside, ruins of war, and a tradition of visionary art rooted in British soil. They became known, not through any formal alliance, but through a shared sensibility that critics would later term Neo-Romanticism.

Coined by critic Raymond Mortimer in 1942, the label captured the emergence of a mood more than a movement—one shaped by the isolation of wartime, nostalgia for the pre-industrial past, and a resistance to the rationality of both realism and international abstraction.

Imagining a British Landscape

The core of the Neo-Romantic vision was the idea of the particular—a term championed by John Piper to describe the singular, the local, and the poetic. This stood in contrast to the universal claims of abstraction or the detachment of the Euston Road School's realism. Instead, artists like Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Paul Nash sought out emotionally charged landscapes, crumbling churches, twisted trees, and ancient paths steeped in memory.

Their inspirations came not from Paris or New York, but from Blake, Palmer, Turner, and Fuseli—nineteenth-century artists who had explored dream states, mythic terrains, and the darker folds of the imagination. Surrealism also lingered at the edges of Neo-Romantic work, evident in the sometimes uncanny, otherworldly quality of their forms.

War and a Wounded Land

The Second World War intensified this tendency. Bombed cities, darkened skies, and national uncertainty deepened the Neo-Romantic attachment to the idea of a threatened, fragile Britain. Artists like Piper and Sutherland were officially commissioned to document the home front, producing emotionally resonant images of ruin and resilience. Their works were not documentary so much as elegiac—imbued with atmosphere, absence, and a deep feeling for place.

From Reverie to Rejection

By the 1950s, however, the mood had shifted. The growing influence of American abstraction, the post-war push toward modernisation, and a younger generation’s desire to look outward meant that Neo-Romanticism fell swiftly out of fashion. Its poetic melancholy, its provincialism, even its visual lushness came to be seen by some as outdated or overly sentimental.

And yet, the best of Neo-Romantic work remains deeply affecting—attuned to memory, rooted in place, and rich with a kind of quiet defiance.

Neo-Romantics and the Borough Group: A Shared Terrain

Though David Bomberg and his students at the Borough Polytechnic were not associated with the Neo-Romantics, the two movements shared certain preoccupations—especially a sensitivity to place and a commitment to painting London in the aftermath of war. John Piper’s wartime images of ruined churches, broken masonry and spectral cityscapes resonate with the Borough Group’s own explorations of Blitzed London.

Bomberg himself had a complex relationship with Romanticism. While he rejected its mysticism, he believed passionately in the spiritual force of landscape and the expressive power of paint. Like Piper, he resisted the intellectualised detachment of abstraction and instead demanded from his students an emotional, embodied engagement with their subjects—what he called the spirit in the mass.

The Borough Group’s post-war paintings, like those of the Neo-Romantics, are also shaped by Britain’s broken terrain, but filtered through Bomberg’s intense, physical vision—a different kind of Romanticism, perhaps, forged not in reverie but in struggle.

Further Reading:

• John Piper, British Romantic Artists, 1942

• Exhibition: Romantic Moderns (Barbican, 2011)

• Neo-Romantic Art: British Art in the Forties (Tate archive)