House of Commons commission for a creative practitioner to run a residency programme commemorating and celebrating race discrimination legislation.
The Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art seeks to commission a UK-based creative practitioner to undertake a residency to create six new works, through participatory community workshops, relating to the development of race discrimination legislation. These works will be displayed during October/November 2018 within the participating local communities, and early in 2019 in the Houses of Parliament.
The residency is to mark the campaign for, and the passing of early race discrimination legislation in 1965, 1968 and 1976, it will reflect and celebrate:
the growth of an inclusive democracy;
the people who campaigned and fought for the changes of legislation;
the experience of the generations who, empowered by the legislation, continued to campaign.
At the end of the residency the practitioner will have the opportunity to develop a proposal for a piece of art suitable for permanent display in Parliament and acquisition into the Parliamentary Art Collection.
Practitioners working in the areas of fine art, iPad/digital art, photography, design or craft with experience in both exhibition and community-based practice are invited to apply before 12 noon on April 12th 2017.
The project studio space is being established at Bexhill Museum. Here; research will be made, concepts formed, ideas discussed and explorations made – Ahead of delivering three innovative heritage exhibitions.
Exploring ancient building material with Bexhill Museum Curator, Julian Porter
Museum volunteer – Yvonne adding the borders to East Sussex in the interactive migration map.
This exciting community project will explore the heritage of migration in the region, discover the contributions migration has made to the development of the area, and discusses contemporary global topics. A partnership between Bexhill Museum, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion, this project and exhibition is being developed and curated by students from Bexhill 6th Form College and Sussex Coast College Hastings.
The New Line showcases publicity material created by the leading designers of the 1930s for organisations such as Shell, the General Post Office and Fortnum & Mason drawn from the V&A’s National Art Library and three private collections. My research for the exhibition was focused on the designers, their particular working practices and any snippets of information that would add colour or context to the works. We were particularly interested in exploring how design was used to negotiate new ideas of modernity during this decade of social, cultural and political change and its role in explaining to the public how new technologies, such as the telephone, would fit into their everyday lives.
During the 1930s, most designers were men and in the printing industry women were not even allowed to enter the trade as an apprentice, so I was excited to discover that one of the designers, Paul Beaujon, responsible for the pacifist pamphlet Peace Under Earth, was in fact a pseudonym for a woman, Beatrice Warde.
Beatrice Warde (1900-1969) was an expert in typography, a prolific writer and educator who lectured widely to printers, students and typographers. Born in New York, she was the only daughter of May Lamberton Becker, a book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune and Gustave Becker, a composer and music teacher. In a transcript of a rediscovered 1959 interview, published online in Eye (no. 84 vol. 21, 2012), she described how her love of calligraphy as a child led to a deep interest in typography and explained that she used a ‘pen name’ because women at that time were not well respected in the printing profession; she decided upon a French name to be a little more ‘mysterious’.
Installation shot taken in The New Line: Jobbing Printing Collection, De La Warr Pavilion. Open until 12 March 2017.
Beatrice began her career by working as Henry Lewis Bullen’s assistant at the American Type Founders (ATF) Company’s typographic library, a repository that at its peak contained more than 16,000 books, periodicals and rare works from the printing trade. She later observed that the library didn’t have many visitors so it was the perfect place to research her interest in typography.
Moving to London in the early 1920s with her husband Frederic Warde, a typographic designer who had also been Director of Printing at Princeton University Press, she continued to build on her base of knowledge, publishing her influential article, “The Garamond Types, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Sources Considered” under her pseudonym, Paul Beaujon in 1926. The article appeared in The Fleuron, the journal of typography and book arts edited by Stanley Morison and was based on her extensive research. It proposed that many typefaces previously attributed to Claude Garmont were in fact created 90 years later by Jean Jannon. As a result of this article, she was offered the part-time role of editor for the Monotype Recorder and was subsequently promoted to publicity manager in 1929, a post she retained until her retirement in 1960.
A strong advocate for greater clarity in the way typography and printing were used in communications, the lecture she gave to the British Typographer’s Guild would become the basis of her influential series of essays published in the volume (1932) in which she asserted ‘that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds.’ Reading her texts I was struck by how the force of her personality leaps off the page, she writes with huge enthusiasm, sincerity and wit.
The crystal goblet: Sixteen essays on typography’ by Beatrice Warde. First edition published by Sylvan Press, London (1955).
Beatrice was a trailblazer for women in her profession. She was first female (honorary) member of the Type Directors Club in 1960 and her broadside, This is a Printing Office, a rallying cry for the printing industry, has since been displayed inside printing offices all over the world and appears cast in bronze at the entrance to the United States Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C.
Printing Office. Source: Google images.
For those who would like to find out more about Beatrice and how she inspired future generations of designers, typographers and printers, The V&A’s National Art Library holds a significant amount of Monotype material in their archive and her personal, family and professional papers can be found in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. I hope you enjoy finding out about this extraordinary ‘first lady of typography’ as much as I did.
Getting children aged 5-7 years old to engage with art can be a challenge, so I decided to turn the experience into an adventure. The Dancing in Dream Land workshop guided children through a journey in which they explored the artwork in the Elizabeth Price exhibition.
Focusing solely on the Sleeping section of the exhibition, the children considered states of sleeping, consciousness and dreaming through dance and movement. Spending part of the workshop in the gallery, the children were asked to identify sleeping figures and take on their shapes, exploring the different positions that we can sleep in. We studied an excerpt from Charles Laughton’s film, The Night of the Hunter (1955), noting the dreamlike scenarios and imagery.
Back in the studio, we began our journey into dreamland based on Laughton’s imagery and the children’s own imaginations. We ventured through a river made of lemonade, a field with grass so tall it touched the clouds, we were trapped in a spider’s web, and finally were carried back to our beds on giant butterflies.
In each section of dreamland, the children considered how their bodies moved and changed. Our arms became the long grass, we floated into the clouds and we struggled and wriggled free of the giant spider’s web. Through moving, shaking and burning off some half-term energy the children engaged with some of the themes and concepts in the Price exhibition, and we had a lot of fun in the process!
Hello! My name is Emily Robertson and I am a contemporary dance choreographer and performer. As a choreographer my practice is currently focused on exploring methods to translate works of art into dance. I also run workshops in schools around the country that teach elements of the curriculum through dance and movement, a practice called ‘kinaesthetic learning’. This method offers students a new perspective in which to interact with their school work. It gives them an opportunity to bring their thought processes out of their minds and into the space in front of them and offers them the ability to translate those thoughts into something physical and tactile. It is a practice that is on the rise in dance education, and whilst aiding students in grasping their curriculum it also nurtures creativity and teamwork skills.
The world of visual art can feel inaccessible to school students, and quite often interaction with high art is not something that happens outside of the art classroom. Therefore, I have teamed up with the Learning and Participation department at the De La Warr to formulate workshops and CPD sessions for students and teachers exploring the exhibition IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, curated by Elizabeth Price.
For the CPD session on 30th January 2017, I wanted to offer the teachers a ‘toolkit’ to implement kinesthetic learning in their classrooms. I ran the CPD session as if they were students, so they could have an immersive experience of the session and discover how it feels to learn kinesthetically for themselves.
After an obligatory round of tea and cake, we entered the gallery space and began to move! I led the teachers through a lesson plan filled with tasks that required them to move, think, explore and create around the artworks in the exhibition. In one particular task, the teachers created physical ‘dream stories’ for Edward Onslow Ford’s Snowdrift (1901) and Gavin Turk’s Nomad (2002). After a few bouts of giggles and nerves, the teachers began to work in groups to create physical dream stories exploring each sculpture. I was genuinely blown away by the artistry and commitment to the movement the whole group applied to the tasks. I could tell they were beginning to explore the concepts of the artworks through this new perspective and may have even surprised themselves with their beautiful physical creations.
After the CPD session, the group had a lovely air of teamwork and creative achievement about them. We played, danced and laughed but also learned how to interact physically with complex artistic concepts and make them tangible and fun to explore. I hope their students have as much fun exploring these tasks in the classroom as we had in the gallery!
Music Month, an initiative set up by organisations across 1066 country that have come together to support and develop the vibrant music sector in Hastings and Rother, starts this week with over 150 events taking place.
Running from Valentine’s Day (14 February) to St Patrick’s Day (17 March) it will encompass some of the area’s best music events from larger venues, to the many pubs and bars that are the heart of the local grassroots music scene.
Hastings and Rother have been declared a Music City and the formal launch of this idea will take place on Monday 27 February at The Palace, Hastings as part of the UnConvention; a one day music conference featuring panellist conversations with BBC Introducing the South and workshops about the future of the music industry.
A major element of Music Month features the Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition (HIPCC). Now in its 13th year, HIPCC brings world class musicians to Hastings to compete for the coveted winning title but this year there is more. Local pianists have the chance to get involved and play on a grand piano in probably the most obscure of venues; the world’s largest underground skate park, The Source. Pianists can book a slot to play at The Source on 14 February while local skaters and BMXers enjoy the thrill of their ride.
Hastings Fat Tuesday runs from Friday 24 February to the main event on Tuesday 28 February, Fat Tuesday; a night of fancy dress, fabulous feathers, beads, masks and music. Twelve venues host The Fat Tuesday Tour where 24 bands play 20 minute sets in 3 venues and headlining this year is UK Britpop trio, Dodgy best known for their chart hits ‘Staying Out for the Summer’ and ‘Good Enough’.
The area has a proven record for attracting top names and Bexhill welcomes Simon Green aka Bonobo to the De La Warr Pavilion on 4 March to launch his new album, Migration. This electronic masterpiece is Bonobo’s sixth album.
De La Warr Pavilion director of external relations, Sally Ann Lycett commented:
“The De La Warr Pavilion, heralded by its audiences as one of the best music venues on the south coast, is proud to be part of Music Month – an exciting initiative linking music professionals and music lovers across 1066 Country. With a capacity of 1500 (standing) and up to 1000 (seated) we are part of the rich and varied mix of music venues in Hastings and Rother – including festivals in Battle and Rye- and are perfectly placed to be the go-to venue outside London for top music artists such as Bonobo who actively seek venues of character and intimacy to reach their audiences. Coming up later in the year – Tom Chaplin, Maximo Park and Alexis Taylor.”
Tara Neville is our Digital Marketing Apprentice from DV8 Sussex. Tara has been with us since last July and we asked her how she felt she was getting on and to give us an insight into her day.
How long have you been with DLWP and what is your role within the team?
I started my apprenticeship and work with the De La Warr Pavilion at the start of July 2016 and my role within the team is to assist the Communications Team in seeking, developing and engaging new audiences for Live programs via existing and new channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
What would a typical day be for you?
A typical day for me in the office would involve updating information on all online channels such as our website, listings, and social media accounts to boost engagement with audiences about events here and the building in general. I strive to increase followers and engagement on the @dlwp_boxoffice twitter account while also engaging with as many key influences such as press, bloggers, music critics and fans as possible.
I also use analytics tools to manage and organise statistical data through our online channels using Facebook analytics, Google Analytics and more to manage what works for our customers and what has been successful for the business when creating and paying for advertisements. Here I would manage engagement rates, click-throughs, comments, sales and more.
As well as this online activity, I also assist the communications team with data interrogation within our Spektrix system by sorting through data to make sure that no duplicates appear within our database and entering new information such as new customers into the database. I also create e-mails and create targeted and refined customer lists to ensure content is sent to the most relevant people.
What have you learned since your last blog?
Since my last blog, my knowledge has expanded and I have a deeper understanding of audiences and how to target people differently. Since then, having the opportunity to create and send out email campaigns has helped me understand this more and what certain audiences want to receive and how they respond to certain information. I can see which links have been clicked on, open rates, bounce backs and ROI which gives me a better outlook of how the marketing team works.
I have also been a part of a very exciting project for the De La Warr Pavilion with the new launch of their website. This has been a huge part of my work here and I have had the opportunity to involve myself within more activities within the business since my last post! It’s been great to be involved in such a large project for the venue and follow it step-by-step.
Tell me a bit about the AMA Marketing day you attended?
On the 2nd December 2016, I attended the Arts Marketing Agency Digital Marketing Day at Kings Place, London. This is an event where several digital marketers attended to get involved in lectures and talks to expand their knowledge and gather new and fresh ideas! This was a great experience and I got to meet so many different people working on many different projects within their businesses! It was very interesting to see how different companies work and what priorities people have in comparison to us depending on their target market.
What would you like to have achieved at the end of your apprenticeship?
At the end of my apprenticeship, I hope to achieve my Digital Marketing Diploma with DV8 Sussex alongside gathering skills and knowledge from my work to help me gain more confidence, communication skills and creative writing skills to engage with people online and in person to the best I can in the most appropriate way.
I hope the skills and experience I pick up from this year will help me start a career within this growing sector and that I would have learnt to understand how Digital Marketing and aspects of Social Media can positively impact real life businesses within a range of different industries.
Through projects such as Jerwood Gallery, Stade Open Space, Source BMX Park and the Pier, Hastings is visibly redefining itself as a creative, attractive and exciting place to live, work and invest.
Through culture-led regeneration over the past 10-15 years Hastings and Bexhill has seen impressive transformation and now Hastings Borough Council wishes to build and enhance the role of culture, arts and heritage for the long-term future.
Rapid change and growth of cultural activity in this area has identified gaps in knowledge of the cultural sector and infrastructure which Hastings Borough Council and the Hastings and Rother Cultural Leaders Group; a strategic group bringing together key cultural and public sector partners, wish to address. Funded by Arts Council England, this will include commissioning a comprehensive review of venues in Hastings and Bexhill, with a focus on venues for live performance.
“We are really proud of the fact that Hastings has been recognised as having ‘culture at its heart’ and we want to develop opportunities further to sustain this for the future. Working with Sound Diplomacy in partnership with the Music Venue Trust, we will identify and produce an assessment of live music opportunities in Hastings and Bexhill focusing on grassroots music venues” said Cllr Dawn Poole, the council’s lead member for culture and leisure.
She added: “We are asking venues to get involved and tell us what they have to offer. We want to identify the current number of bars, pubs and restaurants with music, other performance opportunities including theatres and festivals, the number of rehearsal facilities and the amount of live performance opportunities staged per week. The number of jobs, audience demand and licencing conditions associated with current venues will also be assessed”.
Shain Shapiro from Sound Diplomacy commented: “We’re thrilled to be working with Music Venue Trust on this venue review for the council. There’s an amazing amount of talent in the area and it’s impressive that the council is so forward thinking in realising the cultural and economic opportunities that music can bring to the area. We look forward to getting stuck in.”
Venues that show music and live performance and musicians are all encouraged to complete the survey.
Are you a creative worker? Do you run a creative business? Are you based in East Sussex or would you like to relocate to East Sussex?
In order to inform investment in workspaces for creative businesses, East Sussex County Council is conducting a survey to learn more about what type of workspaces you need and what the current level of demand is.
This will help ESCC understand where additional workspace is needed and it will help to attract providers of workspace into the county.
To help please fill out an online Creative Workspace Enquiry.
It should take about 15 minutes to complete.
We cross paths with many people in our working lives, sometimes those relationships and experiences stay with you forever. I first met Ed Barber in 1997, continuing the commissioning of a series of installation photography at the Crafts Council Gallery. There was I in my twenties, pretty green and a little over confident, art directing a photographer whose experience and portfolio left me standing. However, Ed liked to talk, he liked to talk you through the shots, through the work, and about the people who made the work, he liked the challenge of engagement and the interaction. He cared about the practice of making and the debate around it.
Indeed, our digital slide library, Photostore, was full of Ed’s images. Makers commissioned Ed to document their work, to take their portraits, and his images were used to document the Crafts Council Collection, Chelsea Craft Fair and embellish pages of Crafts Magazine. I always remember Ed talking so passionately about his relationship with Peter Dormer, the writer and critic who died in 1996. Ed took the images for the Culture of Craft, edited by Dormer and published in 1997 and was an active supporter of the Peter Dormer annual lecture series hosted at the RCA in his memory. Dormer was appreciated by makers because he understood the skills and judgement in the making process; Ed followed this tradition, he was critically engaged through his photographs, which of course were meticulously crafted objects in their own right. I remember him being quite effected by his passing.
Ed taught me about looking, editing, selection and being confident in standing up for what you think is right. He would always consult me in the selection of shots from the contact sheet, but would steer me to pick the best image, educating my judgement. This is such a generous quality.
In 2003, we celebrated 30 years of the Crafts Council Setting Up Scheme and as part of the related exhibition and catalogue, we commissioned Ed to head off on tour around the UK to take 30 portraits of makers. The commission played to his strengths, relationships, understanding of the subject matter, and demonstrated his skill as a portrait photographer. Those documented included: Gary Breeze; John Mills; Carl Clerkin; Tom Dixon; Shin and Tomoko Azumi; Dai Rees; Jacqueline Poncelet; Janice Tchalenko; Chris Keenan; Mah Rana; Pauline Burbidge; Kei Ito; Jane Atfield; David Poston; Adam Paxon; Neil Brownsword; and Simone ten Hompel.
He said, ‘I wanted to avoid craftsperson/maker at work reportage style imagery or formal highly staged and lit studio shoots. I opted for a simple direct approach to give this body of work an integrity and visual cohesion. I chose ambient lighting, the same wide-angle lens throughout. The emphasis was on the individual, within their domestic landscape or working environment.
I travelled across England, Scotland and Wales over a period of three months in early 2003 to produce the largest and most wide-ranging documentary of British makers ever commissioned. 30/30 Vision deliberately reveals 30 different ways of working and making – ranging across urban, rural and suburban contexts and including people with diverse backgrounds and skills.’
The striking thing was, that as a freelance photographer, Ed was an extraordinary self-starter and was always proactively developing his own projects and self-publishing, with the establishment of Concrete Editions. My memory at this time was of his dedication to his 15-18: Teenagers In Their Rooms series and the epic In the City, which was the result of being influenced by his home location within the Barbican Estate, published as a limited edition book (Concrete Editions 2000), followed by a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001.
Resolve: An Intimate Survey of Work (Concrete Editions 2013), a project initiated with Danielle Inga, continued the appreciation of those who run small businesses, work freelance or pursue self-employment.
Ed and Danielle also went on to commission makers themselves as part of their ongoing interest and support of the applied arts sector in the form of Concrete Collaborations, this included Maiko Dawson, Gary Breeze and Amanda Doughty.
Ed was an inspiration, always believing that works would be published or exhibited, even when the funding landscape looked challenging. He never failed to get a positive result.
He exhibited widely, including the Design Museum, Flowers East, ICA London, Museum of London, National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin, Tate Britain, V&A. Ed was also a brilliant designer, curator and teacher, and was formerly Subject Director for Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion.
Late last year, Ed’s exhibition Peace Signs, formed part of the IWM contemporary programme in London. The exhibition was formed from a collected body of work that recorded major protests staged at key sites such as RAF/USAF Greenham Common, Westminster, Trafalgar Square and the City of London. The work is a unique social document of mass popular protest in late twentieth century Britain which has rarely been seen in public since it was first published in 1984.
The preceding exhibition at IWM was by Peter Kennard, Unofficial War Artist. This seems appropriate as Ed collaborated with Kennard in 1979 and which triggered his five-year documentary on the Peace Movement, inspired by the anti-nuclear activists in his North London neighbourhood. This culminated in the book Peace Moves: Nuclear Protest in the 1980s (Chatto & Windus 1984) and the touring exhibition Bomb Disposal: Peace Camps and Direct Action.
Ed also collaborated on Sanity, a visual exploration of the campaign for nuclear disarmament through the work of CND, Kennard, Banksy, Kai & Sunny and Griffin by Donald Christie.
This work continues to resonate, documenting those at the sharp end of the fight with such compassion; I wish we could commission Ed to document the 2017 international protests that we have seen in the last month.
Our thoughts are with Ed’s wife and collaborator Danielle Inga, and his daughters Sonya and Nina. He was a great friend and mentor and will be greatly missed.
