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News and musings from the UCL Culture team
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 31 July 2015
She reads:
“Where am I? Inside. Outside. Included. Excluded”
Pause. Changing page. She continues:
“ I, a mime student: an actor without words. I, a dancer: repeating movement by movement. Again and again”
Anja Olofgörs reading during performance of her piece Social Constructs, Slade MA Degree Show, 2015
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 1 July 2015
Dyck, Anthony van (1599-1641), Anthony Van Dyck, 1645, UCL Art Museum Collection
At Glastonbury Festival this year, singer Kanye West claimed he was the ‘greatest living rock star on the planet’. Here at the UCL Art Museum, we’d like to claim that we are the greatest living art collection on campus, hosting a wonderful treasure trove of work dating from the 1490’s to the present day. We can afford to be as confident as Kanye, with a collection by artists such as Durer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck Turner, Dora Carrington, Stanley Spencer and Paula Rego.
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 24 June 2015
Subversive Millinery workshop
Last Thursday 18 June UCL Art Museum was the setting for a meeting of the secret subversive millinery group (also known as our annual hat making workshop).
By Debbie J Challis, on 9 June 2015
Flinders Petrie’s ‘Pocket Diary’ entry for 7 June 1915. Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology Archives.
On 7 June 1915 the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology opened its doors at UCL for the first time. On the day Petrie wrote in his pocket diary ‘exhibitions of whole collection finally arranged’. There was plenty else going on in the world, not least in London and Egypt. (more…)
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 4 June 2015
Here’s our second Re-Launch in conversation interview, this time with artist Julia McKinlay.
Can you tell us a little about you as an artist and your current practice?
My work often begins with a research expedition to a museum or particular landscape. At the moment I am in Iceland to see the unique volcanic landscape there and hopefully this research will lead to some new work. I move between sculpture and printmaking. My main interest is in trying to create another world in the gallery through using space and structures to display a collection of objects that I have made to represent different elements of an environment. Here’s a link to my blog for my Boise Travel Scholarship funded time in Iceland.
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 2 June 2015
It’s been great working on the Re-Launch exhibition this summer term. To give you more of an insight into the artists whose work is included in the show I’ve interviewed some of them to find out more about their practice and connection to UCL Art Museum and the Slade School of Art. Below is the first artist interview with artist Kate Keara Pelen.
By Jenny M Wedgbury, on 28 May 2015
It’s been an exciting few months for UCL Art Museum’s HQ with the completion of reburbishment work and the opening of our Re-Launch summer exhibition. Our main space may sit on a footprint that is just short of that of half a tennis court but for a space so small we have big ambitions and a wide reach.
By Alice Stevenson, on 24 July 2014
I’ve recently returned from holiday in Cascais, near Lisbon in Portugal, which was for the most part a fairly relaxing break. For the most part. There was the small matter of a rather lengthy complaint furiously scribbled into a comments book at one particular museum we visited and my husband being subjected to an in-depth critique of ethical museum display practice – for several hours. So what got me so agitated? The display of three mummies: two Peruvian and one Egyptian in the Museu Aqueológico do Carmo, Lisbon.
All blue skies? Outside the Museu Aqueológico do Carmo, Lisbon.
By ucbthjc, on 23 June 2014
In July 2014 at UCL we will begin a new 3 year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to explore the value and role of museums in social prescribing.
Social prescribing links patients in primary care with local sources of support within the community which can improve their health and wellbeing. ‘Museums on Prescription’, or MoP as we affectionately call the project, is the first of its kind internationally, and will research the development and efficacy of a novel referral scheme. The project will connect socially isolated, vulnerable and lonely older people, referred through the NHS, Local Authority Adult Social Care services and charities, to partner museums in Central London and Kent.
By Alice Stevenson, on 30 May 2014
Guest Blog by Valentina Gasperini
In our sixth in the series of different perspectives on Egyptian potteryValentina Gasperini, a post-doctoral reseracher at the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology University of Liverpool, looks at a Cypriote pottery vessel found in Egypt.
As a ceramicist interested in trade and exchange, particularly at the site of Gurob (located at the entrance to the Fayum region), I would like to present a Cypriot juglet found there during Dynasty 18 (c. 1550–1292 BC) and currently located in the Petrie Museum. This vessel can be studied from a variety of viewpoints and it provides important clues about chronology, social needs and changes in fashion.
UC13441 was found at Gurob, most probably during the Brunton and Engelbach archaeological campaign of 1920. When dealing with these early excavations the job of a ceramicist often becomes like that of a detective. By cross-examining the excavation reports and a series of clues, I have been able to trace the original context of discovery of this item: Gurob tomb 603.
A well-travelled pottery vessel currently in the Petrie Museum, London, excavated in Egypt, but made in Cyprus more than 3000 years ago.
