The Kids in Museums Youth Panel ‘Take Over’ Borough Road Gallery

Louisa and Tasha installing Self-Portrait

In November, Borough Road Gallery took part in Kids in Museums Takeover Day https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/what-we-do/takeover-day/ , when young people take over various roles in museums, galleries and historic sites across the UK.

Borough Road Gallery was taken over by the Kids in Museums Youth Panel, a group of eight young people who work with Kids in Museums staff and trustees to improve the access and inclusivity of museums for other young people. The gallery was one of 175 venues that took part in Takeover Day this year, with others including the Museum of London, National Museum Cardiff and York Minister.

The Youth Panel decided to take over Borough Road Gallery after two members, Holly and Tasha, ran the gallery’s social media accounts for Kids in Museums Teen Digital Takeover Day https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/what-we-do/teen-digital-takeover/ in August. Afterwards, the Panel decided it would be fun to run our own event Pose: Making and Taking Portraits at the gallery for the next Takeover Day, appealing to people of a similar age to us.

“After working so hard as a team to plan and orchestrate our very own Takeover Day, it was great to see our ideas come into fruition. It felt like we were given such a big responsibility, which was really empowering and it allowed for us to be creative.” - Holly

The Panel collectively chose which two artworks from the London South Bank University collections should be on display for the event. We decided on Bent Figure by Edna Mann and Self-Portrait by Dorothy Mead. These artworks were chosen to showcase the works of women in the Borough Group and to “increase the profile of artists that often get lost in the vast discourse of art history”. Mann’s use of charcoal and portrayal of movement in Bent Figure inspired the theme and main activity of our Takeover Day. The Panel was divided into teams to carry out the following roles in preparation for the event:

• Pre-event audience research

• Planning logistics

• Marketing and comm

• Curation and installation

• Post-event research

Eight people based across the country collaborating on one event is not an easy task. After hours of video conferencing, endless WhatsApp-ing and exhausting a Google Drive folder, the event was ready to go.

The event started with a charcoal drawing activity led by artist Jenny Bell. Three participants held different poses portraying movement, while everyone else had to draw the participants with charcoal without looking at their paper. After lots of laughter at the outcomes, these were all showcased on the wall of the gallery alongside the works of Edna Mann and Dorothy Mead.

Other activities from the day included a talk from the curator at Borough Road Gallery and two Youth Panel members, Louisa and Tasha, who were part of the curation team. This included a ‘two truths and a lie’ game about the artists, the background of the art and why the Youth Panel chose each artwork. A photo booth area was also set up in the gallery for movement-inspired selfies.

Youth Panel member Chloe said: “A highlight was taking part in the drawing workshop. It was interesting to experience an approach to drawing where careful observation was the objective, rather than creating a masterpiece.”

Reflections from the Panel also included potential improvements, like marketing the event sooner and choosing a theme that is more relevant to young people.

In November 2020 Kids in Museums will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Takeover Day with a week-long Takeover Day Festival. To find out more and how to get involved, visit www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk/takeoverday

Tasha Brown, Kids in Museums Youth Panel member

Curator talk

Youth Panel in the photo booth

Female Modern British Artists Wikipedia Editathon: My Experience

Female Modern British Artists Wikipedia Editathon: My Experience

For me, like most people I would guess, Wikipedia is an information source that I consult weekly if not daily. I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that most of us would be a lot more lost without it. With it being such a wealth of information and so readily available, I easily forget that each and every Wikipedia entry is written by a living, breathing person. The editathon served to remind me that this free font of knowledge, is a human product that has taken care and effort by a community of editors around the world. So in being reminded of that, it was nice to be able to give back by contributing something myself.

I was quite shocked to learn that only 17% of the 1.5 million Wiki biographies written in English are of women. I want to thank Borough Road Gallery and Wikimedia, for providing an opportunity to contribute to the changing of that statistic.

The process of writing the article was harder than I had thought it would be. I chose to write about Rachel Nicholson and was surprised to find a very private individual with very little online presence - this coupled with the need for authoritative sources made the beginning of the writing experience a little frustrating. By the end of the editathon, I’d made progress and gained even more appreciation for the efforts of Wikipedia editors.

All in all, it was a very wholesome experience. As a young freelance creative just starting out, I’m feeling the pressure to specialise, to tie myself to one area of expertise, when all I want to be doing is experimenting. It was somewhat serendipitous that I stumbled upon Rachel Nicholson among a long list of names; Nicholson didn’t become a painter until she was in her forties. Being the daughter of two famous artists, she resisted the pressures to become an artist until it was right for her. Learning this was reassuring and calmed a few of my ‘recent graduate jitters’.

I didn’t quite get to finish my piece, and as all articles go through a checking process, a Wiki bio of Rachel Nicholson is still “coming soon”. I’d really encourage anyone who has some spare time, to get editing an article themselves because it’s such a simple and easy process, only requiring time and interest in the subject matter.

Lennie.

www.lenniehoward.co.uk

Instagram: @lenniehoward

Review of Breathing in the Borough Archive in Garageland

Abigail Ashford finds herself in the company of a chihuahua whilst following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the aura of a painting can be physically inhaled into the body at an installation by Accounts & Records.

'Stroke the cat. It doesn’t matter if it turns into a dog'. So reads a line from Edwina Attlee’s poem Bourges, which accompanied the recent installation Breathing in the Borough Road Archive at The Borough Road Gallery. Enjoy the kind of pleasant sensation you get from an action like stroking a small furry animal. It doesn’t matter if it mutates and changes form dramatically. The tactile pleasure is still there, so make the most of it. At least that’s what I took away from both the poem and the installation. Exhibitions that deal with archives can often enshrine the original artifact and beg us to consider its value in poor lighting behind a glass case, the surrounding walls crowded with textual evidence of its legitimacy. A work such as Breathing in offers an alternative to this genre and mode of display, focusing instead on personal, physiological encounters with objects, using the paintings and drawings of The Borough Road Group, led by artist David Bomberg in the mid-20th century, as a starting point.

The Borough Road Gallery is an unassuming space, tucked away in a campus building of London South Bank University. Here, at the old Borough Polytechnic, David Bomberg held his discursive life-drawing classes, encouraging students and fellow artists such as Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann, Cliff Holden and Dennis Creffield to move away from the stifling academic traditions of British art schools. Small holes pepper the plaster walls of the gallery’s single room, left by overzealous photography students erecting degree shows. The space sits empty for extended periods, the collection it was built to display sitting in storage, while the university concentrates its resources elsewhere.

At the opening, I stroke a chihuahua called Wolfgang as he determinedly tries to sit on a circular carpet in the centre of the space, woven to emulate the prints covering the walls. The pockmarked walls have been covered in a myriad of blue and white sheets, which I recognise as the result of water printing, a staple in many a child’s primary education. The simple palette, grace and scale of the work is much more calmly orchestrated than your average kid in art class, though I’m still drawn to stare into the swirling patterns, mesmerised and soothed. The clouds of ink mutate from marble, to water, to a brain scan in a sort of oddly relaxing Rorschach test. Oblong gaps cut out of the paper evoke the paintings conspicuously missing from the walls. Paintings from the archive are instead leant against another wall dressed in fresh pink packing and bubble wrap cocoons, held together with tape declaring them FRAGILE. Which works these are and by which artists is not disclosed. The composition visualises the problems of funding and visibility the collection faces, but literally repackages the artworks in the quirky spatial language of installation art for a contemporary art viewing public. 

Explaining the difficulties of caring for an often-invisible body of work the collection’s curator Theresa Kneppers tells me that although most collections deal with the issue of work being in storage in light of space and conservation parameters, this is a somewhat unique case for her. Unable to display the paintings at all, she has embraced this as an opportunity to invite artists to respond to the hibernating collection, encouraging them to redress and represent ideas surrounding the material and conceptual archive. Another recent show titled And I Paused saw artist e.t. life projects explore a dialogue between the arrangement of complex thoughts in the human brain and ordered archival systems, drawing on her own experience of dyspraxia and dyslexia. 

Theresa tells me that she commissioned Breathing in with the aim of 'addressing the body in the gallery as something beyond just the visual interaction with the displayed artwork.' Such thinking has shaped the collection from its outset. Sarah Rose, who donated the archive to the university, has written of her close attention to breathing when viewing paintings, passionately comparing the effect of a moving painting to an induced meditation that affects the nervous system, so that the viewer 'not only “sees” the work but also feels it'. The attempt to theorise, explain, use and influence our neural engagements with art has long been explored but has remained somewhat peripheral to the art world; think of Goethe’s speculative colour psychology, or the modern practice of art therapy by psychotherapists. 

However, in their installation, artists Braden and Angela from the Accounts & Records collective, propose a new theory. The catchily titled Insufflation Appreciation asserts that, 'with the right guidance, what Walter Benjamin describes as the “aura” of a painting can be physically inhaled into the body.' They suggest that through such inhalation, the viewer might then empathise with a work of art on a metabolic rather than purely visual level. Playing with the notion of innate essence and originality by conceptualising the 'aura' as a microscopic residue, they describe how 'from the blood, the aura particulate travels up to the brain where it triggers acute and profound synaptic responses.' An audio meditation plays in the gallery to accompany the installation, designed to stimulate this process and release the paintings from the confines of their bubble wrapped obscurity. 

As a creative new interpretation of a little-known collection consigned to the storeroom, the piece works fantastically. By evoking many people’s naïve childhood interaction with creating (what at the time seemed a deeply personal image by pressing paper onto inked water), and viewing art, the artists have created a playful response far removed from serious and often stifling norms of aesthetic contemplation. The audio meditation provides an additional humorous reimagining of the much-scorned gallery audio-guide, and simultaneously taps into the app-based mindfulness and podcasting zeitgeist of the present day, directing us to absorb art viscerally as well as visually. And so, arguably, we can stroke the cat and the dog at the same time. In other words, Breathing in the Borough Road Archive suggests that it is important to continually celebrate the cultural category of the archive but also to broaden its scope and reach concurrently. 

Abigail Ashford

Breathing in the Borough Road Archive

The Borough Road Gallery
London SE1
11-13 April 2019

http://garagelandmagazine.blogspot.com/2019/05/breathing-in-borough-road-archive.html?m=1

Impressions of a Dorothy Mead's Self-Portrait by Fae Morgan

Self Portrait, Dorothy Mead (1928-1975)

A close-up shot of an acrylic painting that is a part of "A David Bomberg Legacy - The Sarah Rose Collection".

The painting is the head and shoulders of a woman, Dorothy Mead, who was a British painter. David Bomberg was her long-time teacher and mentor, his style influencing some of her early works, included dense, thick brushstrokes.

David Bomberg was a British painter best known for his rash, experimental works. World War I and its aftermath severely impacted Bomberg, and in the interwar period, he instead began working primarily on more traditional landscape paintings, reminiscent of Post-Impressionist art. 

What’s intriguing about this painting is that is doesn’t even look like a portrait of a woman, there are no facial features to help indicate whether it’s a man or a woman. You can only tell what the clothes, hair and skin are, thanks to the colouration. The title of the portrait alongside the artist’s name are what tell us it’s a portrait of a woman.

The thick use of paint is very clear in some areas of the painting, from where the brushstrokes end, as the paint was pushed to the end of their stroke and left there. The blue section of the body which represents the clothing that Dorothy Mead was wearing, looks to by a robe of some kind.

In the close-up shot you can see the strokes of either the paintbrush or the scalpel that was used in transferring the paint onto the canvas. The blue being the boldest colour out of the mixed grays and creams. The blue reminds me of a sea or water coming into a cove, with the mixed grays and creams being the cliffs or ground either side of the section of water. If the grays and creams are acting as the ground and if this was the full painting; then there aren’t many places where the ground would be pale. So, the painting could represent water existing in an unnatural place. The darkest shade of grey separates the blue from the pale colour.

-Fae Morgan, Gallery Intern

What are we but meat? Audio work sample

This audio piece is a sample of the piece that Mattia Turchetti created for the performance at the event “What are we but meat?”. The full piece is 21 minutes long.

What are we but meat? Original posters by Cecilia Reeves

Original posters designed by Cecilia Reeves for the performance “What are we but meat?” at the Borough Road Gallery.

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