New research by emerging artists

This exhibition and series of public events formed the 8th annual invitation to students at the Slade School of Art to delve into UCL’s art collections and to create new works in response. For the first time, it was based on a longer residency format. This allowed for more intensive research, with artists discovering many hidden treasures, to produce individual, contemporary works in a range of media, including installation, performance and painting.

Working with the medium of performance, Naomi Fitzsimmons revisited BLAST, a literary magazine produced to promote Vorticism, a modernist art movement headed by Wyndham Lewis. Blast / Bless expanded the archive’s boundaries and meanings by engaging with them in the present with the theatricality of the live format. The work explores techniques utilized to seduce viewers, and how relevance today within and for systems of power. Kara Chin produced paintings with kinetic elements calling attention to the unseen, as embodied by the very nature of the museum’s stored collection. David Blackmore’s research into Countess Markievicz, a former Slade student who was an Irish militant revolutionary, politician and suffragette, also engaged with the unseen by making her conspicuous absence at UCL visible via his sculptural intervention and bespoke archive that inhabited UCL Art Museum, UCL’s main library and the Slade’s Material Museum.

So many fascinating discoveries were made during the residency that a special display box was put together, dedicated to rarely seen material 'From the Vault'. It featured a bi-weekly rotation of items selected by the Slade artists in residence and guest curators from the wider UCL community, including some treasures discovered by UCL Museum Studies students. These objects often required conservation and further research, therefore, the changing display often served as a proposal for further enquiry, encouraging repeated visits to the space and inviting audiences to participate in the process of discovery.

See here for more information about the UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration series.

This is part of UCL Art Collections’ commitment to interdisciplinary research-impact collaborations. For more information or expressions of interest to collaborate contact museums@ucl.ac.uk/