Brand new art venue in Kent: The Old Big School Gallery

By Dr Michaela Giebelhausen

Eleanor Crook, Think back to partings which one had long since seen coming (2014)

The Old Big Schoolgallery at Tonbridge School opened its doors to the public in January this year. It is run as a not-for-profit space that showcases work by established and emerging artists. It also aims to provide a forum for work produced by the school's students and staff. The handsome Victorian school room with its pointed windows and decorative roof beams has been transformed into a contemporary gallery. Along the white-washed walls runs a discreet picture rail and high-tec track lighting floats from the ceiling. At the far end of the gallery a mezzanine level has been inserted. A number of solid partitions can be locked into different positions to subdivide the large room, making this an elegant and versatile display space that blends charming architectural character with a subtle white cube flair.

Emily Glass, the curator at OBS Gallery, put together an ambitious and thought-provoking inaugural exhibition, which presented an impressive array of works by established artists such as Henry Moore, Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili alongside works by recent art school graduates, former students of Tonbridge School and current staff (download the exhibition catalogue here).

In the Flesh explored the body and its representation whilst also inviting reflection on the materiality of the work itself. The focus was on the figure, whether human, animal or spiritual, imagined or real, representational or abstract, portrait or specimen.

Susan Aldworth Reassembling the Self 5 (2012)

The representation of the human figure is quite often a play on the portrait. A number of works in the show stretched the notion of portraiture. In Susan Aldworth's lithograph Reassembling the Self (2012) we encounter the human figure distorted and fragmented by the experience of schizophrenia in what the artist called an anti-portrait. Charlotte Chisholm reworked her own childhood self in Ghost (2014), a photograph she took during a screening of a home movie made by her parents. The former cavorting self is now arrested, and in it stillness paradoxically attests to the passage of time.

Steve Dilworth's Dance of Death (2007)

In A complete failure of the electrical impulses which keep the heart beating (2013), Thomas Parkhouse engages in portraiture of a different kind: he has cast in clay objects designed to be worn. The recast garments speak poignantly of the absent wearer. In casting unstable materials such as leather and cloth Parkhouse implicitly draws attention to the ephemerality and fragility of the body that inhabits the garment and that has shaped its folds and creases. Similarly, Steve Dilworth's Dance of Death (2007) casts the dessicated bodies of a rat and a cat, both dead from arsenic poison and grotesquely stood upright, in the smooth and stable materiality of bronze. Cornelia Parker perhaps offers the most radical transformation of material in Bullet Drawing (2009). Here the bullet's determined and lethal trajectory is spun into a delicate filament that is bent into an uneven grid.

For more information check out what the curator and some of the participating artists had to say:

 

OBS Gallery - In The Flesh from Tonbridge School on Vimeo.

And don't forget to set your compass to East by South East and explore the Old Big School's upcoming exhibition which will feature work by some of the most fascinating and innovative artists from China, Tibet and Japan:  http://www.tonbridge-school.co.uk/about-the-school/our-facilities/obs-gallery/east-by-south-east/

Exhibition Spotlight: Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
April 2014

[NASA]

I was mesmerized by the video that greets the visitor to the British Library's current
exhibition, Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight. In NASA's Perpetual Ocean (2011),
ocean currents are rendered as spiraling white lines that make and unmake themselves as
they whirl across the surface of this virtual earth. The exhibition makes a powerful argument
for the critical importance of the visual in communicating scientific data and helping
scientists and others (including Florence Nightingale, whose important 'Diagram of the
Causes of Mortality in the Army' during the Crimean War is displayed nearby) to persuade
their audiences. As I stood transfixed, I became aware that I was recalling the waves and
eddies that animate Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night (1889, New York, Museum of Modern
Art), and I was struck by the unexpected ways that art can illuminate science, and science art.

Exhibition URL: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science

Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmTY0PKGDs

Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East Florence Nightingale. Notes on matters, affecting the health, efficiency and hospital administration of the British Army. London, 1858. [BL]

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889) [MOMA]

Upcoming Conference: Artistic Practice and the Medical Museum

By Dr Natasha Ruiz-Gómez

The call for papers deadline has been and gone, and now we're sorting through all the abstracts. There is some great research out there...

For hundreds of years, medical collections have been sites of medical and artistic exchange. Not only were many of their contents created by artists and physicians, but the collections were also often compiled by doctors, who were themselves artistes-manqués. Although medical museums have recently received attention in museological and historical studies, they remain relatively ignored within art historical scholarship.

Lisa Temple-Cox, Experience 8, 2007. Mixed media.

This one-day conference will look at the anatomical, pathological or medical museum from the perspectives of art history and visual culture. Artists have utilised these spaces for the study of anatomy and pathology–as well as for ideas and inspiration–but what do we know about the artists, photographers and craftsmen and women who have worked within the museum? How can we theorise the collecting practices of the doctors who founded and/or ran these museums? What role did these spaces and their contents have on artistic practice, visual representation and the writing of art and medical histories? How does the medical museum continue to play a role in contemporary art-making and medical learning? From the wax modelers to the commissioning physicians to the painters and sculptors who were inspired by its contents, this conference will spark a dialogue about the artistry of the medical museum.

This conference will take place on 6 June 2014 in the MacRae Gallery of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

We anticipate publishing a selection of papers from the conference in an edited anthology.

For further information, visit our web page

This conference is associated with the ‘The Sculpture of the Échorché’ conference at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds on 7 June 2014.