Blog post written by Liz Rideal, Leverhume artist in residence at UCL Art Museum and Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art. She also lectures and writes educational material for the National Portrait Gallery.

Being invited to take up the role of artist in residence at UCL Art Museum was an unexpected outcome of Splicing Time, Rome and the Roman Campagna, my 2016-17 Leverhulme Fellowship.

Liz Rideal, Splicing Time: Rome and the Roman Campagna, 2016

One theme was to study Claude Lorraine’s Liber Veritatis drawings, in the British Museum’s collection and attempt to plot their contemporary locations, to study his concept of real, imagined and invented landscape and relate this imagery to my own work in the Roman Campagna today. However, it occurred to me that UCL Art Museum might also be a fruitful venue for my quest and I decided to approach curator Andrea Fredericksen to investigate this further. Coincidentally the museum’s upcoming Legacy exhibition was to concentrate on Richard Cooper Jnr, eighteenth century Grand Tour printmaker, an artist who followed the footsteps of Claude Lorraine and who was thus perfectly suited to my own theme. So, in this synchronous and surprising manner I started to consider Cooper Jnr’s work.

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Josiah Wedgewood (1730 – 1795), Philippe-Égalité, 1790-2 (White jasper ware, dipped in dark blue, applied jasper ware reliefs)

Blog post for UCL Art Museum, Revolution under a King exhibition by Dr Susannah Walker, UCL Art History Department

On 10th February I joined Dr Richard Taws, the co-curator of UCL Art Museum’s current exhibition Revolution under a King: French Prints 1789-92, to give a lunchtime lecture on the prints in the so called “Age of Revolutions”.

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Anja Olofgörs, Social Constructs, 2015, © The Artist

Acquisitions, prize-winning work and the continuing influence of the Slade collection

As UCL Art Museum’s Spotlight on the Slade project continues, I wanted to share two recent acquisitions, by two very different prize-winning Slade artists, studying and working almost a century apart: Jesse Dale Cast (1900-1976) and Anja Olofgörs (b.1987).

The acquisitions demonstrate not only the range of work within the Slade, but also how the collection continues to grow, recording the history of teaching and practice at the School, both through a prize system, which was instigated when the Slade was first established, and through subsequent gifts which support use of the collection. (more…)

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.

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Roberto Rossellini’s Nightmare, Pure Evil

VOTE NOW http://bit.ly/connectpureevil

Old master prints, drawings of flayed bodies, mysterious things in glass jars, extinct animal skeletons, glittery minerals and rocks, amulets and charms from ancient Egypt: UCL Museums and Collections are a treasure trove of the awe inspiring and unusual. But we don’t just think of ourselves as being a collection of objects fixed to one space and place, we believe that the Museum is where the people are and we want to take the spirit of our collections off site for the Museums at Night event on 30 and 31 October. (more…)

Prior to graduation from the Slade in 2011 I participated in the ‘Moreover’ exhibition, organised jointly by the Slade and UCL Art Museum. Having previously used digital imagery as reference, the time spent with the prints brought a new dimension to my work; I shifted away from linear representation to a more embodied depiction of form.

Anon 14, Anon 4, Anon 3

The research focused on ‘anonymous, untitled’ prints, which inspired a body of work called ANON – a series of monotypes, each a unique original print, that explore identity within portraiture. Having gained so much from this period of study, in September 2011  I proposed to develop the project further. By expanding the search to include all forms of portraiture, the research would involve a wider exploration of the formal, conceptual and aesthetic qualities of the genre.

Looking at Rembrandt

Normally, prints are identified through the catalogue system, through a search for a particular artists or keyword. However, rather than search through the database for ‘portrait’ as a title, the idea was to open every archive box searching for portraits.

This also allowed a closer insight into the both the collection and museum’s archive system. Each time a box was opened there was a sense of excitement, with prints several centuries apart in the same box.  The experience of viewing the prints and drawings on easels has been a focal point of this experience.

Research in action – John Flaxman’s drawings displayed on easels

The sense of size, scale and material are often lost in documentation and I gained so much from observing this first hand. Back in the studio scale has been a central theme with the new paintings. A body of work in response to the research has started to take shape;  some are transcriptions of a specific print, whilst others are a wider response to the collection and modes of museum cataloguing.

Studio Wall (wigs galore) and Wig Drawings

Images courtesy of the artist and Hoxton Art Gallery.

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