Coventry Artspace News
Artspace welcomes Laura Elliott
As a result of a successful bid to the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Artspace is delighted to welcome the new Artspace Artists Coordinator, Laura Elliott. Laura joins us from Arts Training Central in Leicester and will be the first port of call for enquiries to Artspace.
Insight : In a unique collaboration between The Herbert and Coventry Artspace, new artworks have been created to mark the completion of the first phase of The Herbert’s development work. Artists based at Coventry’s Artspace Studios were given access to The Herbert’s collections. They were then paired up with a specific curator, collection and site in the new part of the building to create a new piece of work. The resulting artworks demonstrate quite diverse responses to this exploration of the juxtaposition of historic collection and modern site.
This series of artworks has been funded by Arts Council England.
The Social History collection has informed the creation of Janet Vaughan's work, Mrs Gibson's Coat, which hangs in Reception. This work examines the point in time where an object that is simply someone's possession suddenly becomes a museum piece. This moment immediately changes the object's status and the way we look at it. The coat was inspired by items in the museum's collection that would have been commonplace a generation ago, but are now regarded as oddities.
Vicky White has used the Archaeology collection to create her work, Charterhouse Tiles, which is positioned high up in Reception. Her large scale painted panels have been inspired by glassware and floor tiling recovered from the Charterhouse site. She has overlaid a design from a fragment of a medieval floor tile with plans, diagrams and depictions of other finds to create complex patterns. She has used colours reminiscent of the earth tones of ceramic work, the verdigris and slate blue of old metal and the opalescent colours contained in very old glass.
Colin Marsh has produced his work, Boom Town Terminals, for the new café. This work brings together images of Donald Gibson's cutting edge 1950s precinct with images of Coventry people of the same era preserved on cine film in Coventry Archives. He presents them on screens reminiscent of old television sets held by The Herbert. His work aims to provoke a re-examination of the original lines of the Gibson city centre design, and give it back some of the limelight it deserves.
Nicola Richardson's installation, Insight, is suspended in the Media Studios corridor on Floor 1. It is inspired by the hidden web of connections that exists between the many objects in The Herbert's collections. Her artwork is constructed from a series of fragmented images from the collections, which form the clues to an unspecified mystery suspended in space. It invites the viewer to piece these clues together and enjoy the unexpected and puzzling connections they might find.
Paradoxes of presence and absence in the Natural History collection have inspired a meditation on spectacle and ontology for Simon Morris's mixed-media piece, Hiding in the Light. Filled with various juxtaposed interpretative levels, shifting forms on the outer edges coalesce into a stark central anatomical representation. The work engages with various missing qualities of artefact bodies - such as the interior organs, cognition and imaginative life - as well as issues of appearance and pose. With subtle distortion in its transmission of certain details, at its starkest level the piece questions our trust in our knowledge sources, and considers it’s own unseen creative processes as well as its location, adjacent to the bright new empty shaft between the museum's floors.