2024 – A Celebratory Year, 10 Years of Victoria Works Studios
10th Anniversary Programme, 2024
2024 was a busy year for us, celebrating our 10 year anniversary. There were exhibitions, events, collaborations, an artist development day and of course our Words at the Works artist talks It’s been a truly wonderful year, thank you to everyone who’s been involved. Here’s a look back at all of the brilliant talks and events that took place in 2024.
Film - Monday 4th March
‘Five Films about Craft’ - Stroud Film Festival
Introduced by Katy Bevan and Paul Harper, VWS showed five informative and thought provoking films about Craft;
Samantha Moore: Visible Mending,
We Work in a Fragile Material,
Vivien Mason: Handmade Happiness,
David Gates and Helen Carnac,
Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon
Talk - Thursday 21st March
More than Just Stuff; why life is better shared with objects
Peter Ting (L) & Brian Kennedy. Photo by Jan Baldwin
Independent curator Brian Kennedy and ceramic/product designer and gallerist Peter Ting discussed their collecting lives.
About the speakers
Independent curator Brian Kennedy started his career with the Crafts Council of Ireland developing a series of both national and international exhibitions that helped elevate the crafted object from the craft shop to gallery. His exhibitions have been seen across retail spaces, galleries and museums in Dublin, London, Milan, Geneva, and New York and have continuously reimagined what craft is today.
As well as working with institutions, Brian has worked with private galleries curating exhibitions that blur the lines between art, craft and design. He continues to work closely with galleries in Dublin, Geneva, and Hong Kong to deliver exhibitions in public and private spaces.
His recent projects include booths at several international art fairs, a series of exhibitions to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee at Fortnum & Mason, London in 2022, and a major exhibition in Geneva in 2023
As a ceramic and product designer, Peter Ting has worked for Thomas Goode, Asprey, Royal Crown Derby, and Legle Porcelain. He has also created state gifts for the late Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth and numerous exclusive designs for global luxury hotels and Michelin starred restaurants from Shanghai to London. His work is held in the collections of MAD, New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, and recently in M+ Museum, Hong Kong, where he was born.
In 2017 Peter, together with Ying Jian, founded the Ting-Ying gallery with the mission of bringing a dynamic and highly influential vision to contemporary craft by stimulating ongoing dialogues between East and West, tradition and innovation, function and aesthetics.
Brian and Peter are avid collectors and home makers, some of which have been featured in magazines and television.
Talk - Thursday 18th April
On Beauty: Women | Decoration | Disruption
The Picnic, 2022. Papercut by Charlotte Hodes. Photo by Peter Abrahams
A conversation with Charlotte Hodes, artist and Professor of Fine Art at London College of Fashion. Charlotte shared insights into her unique, craft meets fine art process and discussed how she uses decorative patterns and the female figure to disrupt notions of female roles and artistic hierarchies.
About the speaker
A leading figure in contemporary art, Charlotte Hodes’ work profiles her long-standing engagement with the crossovers between the fine and decorative arts, drawing on craft processes to create imagery firmly situated within the language of painting.
Charlotte’s ideas are embedded within the practice of drawing and collage. The layered surfaces of her collages make visible the, often invisible, labour of women. Her signature technique is rooted in female associated activities such as tapestry, embroidery and quilting.
Charlotte has exhibited widely since 1990, with notable solo shows at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool (2020), Bowes Museum, County Durham (2019), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2017) and Wallace Collection, London (2007). She won the 2006 Jerwood drawing prize and has undertaken residencies at Spode, Stoke-on-Trent and the Clay Studio, Philadelphia.
Talk - Thursday 6th June
Future Heritage: how to collect and commission the craft of today to be the heirlooms of tomorrow
Future Heritage 2023, Corinne Julius.
Design critic and curator Corinne Julius talked about her annual contemporary design showcase Future Heritage and shared her experience of collecting and commissioning heirlooms of the future.
About the speaker
Corinne Julius is a freelance journalist, critic, broadcaster, and curator with a special interest in contemporary craft and design. In 2014, she launched Future Heritage, which has become one of the UK’s major contemporary craft shows.
Corinne has been a judge for many applied arts and design awards, including the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for Metalwork. She is a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company Contemporary Collection Committee and, until recently, was Chair of the Wood Awards Furniture and Product Panel, Chair of the Critics’ Circle Visual Arts & Architecture section and a member of the Glenmorangie Collection Committee. She has also served as a Trustee of Contemporary Applied Arts and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art.
Exhibition - 8th /9th & 15th/16th June 2024
Reuse, Reinvent
Image - Foreground - Sam Lucas, Behind - Rebecca Simmons
An exhibition of new work at Victoria Work Studios made in response to the theme of reuse and reinvention.
Participating VWS residents: fine artists Mandy Coppes-Martin, Rachel McDonnell, and Rodger Williams; photographer Amanda Harman; ceramicists Sam Lucas, Rebecca Simmons, and Anna Simson; upholsterer Katerina Gibb; lampshade maker Lampshade Rebellion; jeweller Tessa Milne; silversmith Lucian Taylor; lace maker Jane Wright; mixed media artist Teresa Poole, and art therapist Saira Todd. They will be joined by two former residents, Stroud-based artists Nick Grellier and Lily Cheetham.
Artists’ Development Day - 21st June
Experienced curator and mentor, Mark Devereux led four in-person workshops focussing on core developmental aspects to support artists practice and career development. Using a mix of practical exercises and information-led sessions he helped work through some of the challenges faced by artists today.
Talk - Thursday 4th July
Imagining Ai Differently: speculative fiction and the common octopus
Becoming Octopus Meditation 8, 2020 by Maggie Roberts
Visual artist Maggie Roberts, co-founder of the art collective 0rphan Drift, talked about her recent work considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus.
About the speaker
Maggie Roberts has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision throughout her artistic career, mostly with the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift, which she co-founded in London with Ranu Mukherjee in1994.
In recent years she has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus - as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. 0rphan Drift’s multiple channel video installation If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco, and her Arts Council England funded IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations, both suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception and address human exceptionalism’s limited understanding of ourselves in relation to other kinds of life, whether as the distributed intelligence of the octopus or the synthetic architecture of an AI.
Maggie currently teaches Fine Art Critical Studies at Central St Martins, UAL and is a Senior Research artist on the Ai Design Labs, Royal College of Art, London.
Talk - Thursday 3rd October
The Artist & The Gallerist: a creative relationship
Musician (Large), 2020 Digital C-Type Print (Edition of 6), by Maisie Broadhead
Artist Maisie Broadhead and gallerist Sarah Myerscough have worked together since Maisie’s degree show in 2009. They came to VWS to discuss Maisie’s practice, their creative relationship and the role of the gallerist in the cultural landscape.
About the speakers:
Sarah Myerscough founded her eponymous gallery in 1998. She represents a distinguished group of contemporary craft and design artists whose practices are grounded in craft-making traditions but defined by contemporary innovation and invention. Through diverse making processes, they collectively embrace the complex intersections between history and future; hand and technology; form and function. Sarah’s position on the board of trustees for Cockpit Arts, since 2016, is representative of how she has become a key figurehead in the world of luxury craft and design.
By curating a specialist programme of exhibitions, Sarah Myerscough Gallery advocates the importance for retaining traditions within craft and design, to mould a vision of the future. In doing so, the gallery works in both public and private collections, maintaining a full programme of exhibitions while participating in leading art fairs around the world.
Sarah's educational commitment has culminated in Crafted Art Foundation, proposed for 2024.
Maisie Broadhead’s work often explores themes of inherited value through visual references to the historical and the familiar. Using historical references, combined with contemporary materials and processes, Maisie creates work that presents a sense of illusion and the uncanny. The subjects of Maisie’s work are often those closest to her; family and friends, who regularly feature in her work and inspire their narratives.
Maisie’s practice employs a broad range of materials, processes and collaborators. Commonly her works are a mixture of staged photographic images combined with sculptural elements, and how and where these details meet, becomes a constant dialogue in the work.
In 2013, she was a winner of the Jerwood Makers Open and in 2015 she received a major grant from the Arts Council England for a public commission at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, UK. She's also received public commissions from the Manchester Art Gallery in 2018 and National Glass Centre in 2019, where her work is held as part of their permanent collection. Most recently, Maisie's work is showing as part of The Wellcome collection’s exhibition, Being Human.
Exhibition - A Sense of Place - 12/13th & 19/20th October 2024
Curated by Charlotte Abrahams, the theme reflects the influence this Victorian building and its location has on the artists for whom it is home, and also speaks to wider concepts of belonging and community.
Featured artists include fine artists Emma Cooper Key, Mandy Coppes-Martin, Rachel McDonnell, Saira Todd, Jill Watton and Rodger Williams; ceramicists Sam Lucas and Anna Simson; textile designer Lizzie Mabley; photographers Amanda Harman, Britt Willoughby Dyer and Claudia Legge; lampshade maker Lampshade Rebellion; upholsterer Katerina Gibb; costumier Lara Skowronska; metal artist Lucian Taylor; mixed media artist Teresa Poole and lace maker Jane Wright.
Talk - Thursday 7th November
The Stories We Tell Ourselves: narrative in art
The Matt Smith image: Losing Venus- at the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford, 2020
Ceramic artist and curator Matt Smith talked about how art has presented history as a fixed and accurate account of the past and how he brings this to light by creating ‘lost objects’ and repurposing existing objects in new situations.
About the speaker
Matt Smith is an artist who works with museum collections. Solo exhibitions include Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Flux: Parian Unpacked at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Who Owns History? At Hove Museum, and Queering the Museum at Birmingham Museum.
In 2010 he co-founded Unravelled Arts, curating artist interventions at National Trust properties and in 2015/16 he was artist in residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He holds a PhD in Queer Craft and was Professor of Craft at Konstfack, Stockholm.
Matt’s work is held at the V&A, the Walker Art Gallery, the National Museum Oslo, National Museum of Northern Ireland and the Crafts Council collection.
Talk - Thursday 2nd November
Seeing the World through a more than Human Lens
Art and science combined at the microscopic level in this fascinating, wide-ranging conversation between biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of international best selling book Entangled Life, and visual artist and Emeritus Professor of Art, Design & Science at Central Saint Martins, Rob Kesseler.
About the speakers:
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
His book, Entangled Life, is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and won the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is the presenter of Fungi: Web of Life, a giant screen documentary narrated by Björk.
Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.
Rob Kesseler is an award-winning visual artist, Emeritus Professor of Art, Design & Science at Central Saint Martins, Fellow of the Linnean Society and Ambassador for Royal Microscopical Society. For the past twenty-five years he has worked extensively with botanical scientists and molecular biologists around the world to explore the living world at a microscopic level. Using a range of complex microscopy processes he creates multi-frame composite images of plant organs to create intense large format photographs that captivate the eye and extend the traditions of botanical art into a contemporary field. Collaborators include The Jodrell Laboratory Kew, The John Innes Centre, Norwich, and the Max Planck Institute, Germany.