Art for Life, an Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme Exhibition at Firstsite, Colchester, is the result of a number of workshops with artists and people on the frontline of the health and care sectors. These workshops provided a space to examine their experiences of the pandemic and the effect this significant moment in our collective history has had on their lives. The exhibition features specially-selected loans from the Arts Council Collection, a variety of pieces made by the key workers who took part in the workshops alongside NHS art psychotherapists (who generously gave up their time to support the sessions), as well as contributions from artists affected by the COVID-19 virus.

The wide range of works in Art for Life offer a creative record of this time and reflect many of the shared experiences of life under lockdown - the appreciation of nature, importance of family and community, and the longing for human touch. Three selected photographs from the series Where We Belong (2017) by featured artist Alejandra Carles-Tolra most strongly demonstrate the collective longing to return to a time when we could safely hold hands and hug one another. 

Alejandra Carles-Tolra is a visual artist and educator from Barcelona, currently based in London. She is interested in the relationship between individual and group identity, and the way in which these may influence one another. Where We Belong (2017) is a body of work exploring themes of belonging, femininity and escapism through members of the Jane Austen Pineapple Society. The artist spent over two years working with the society, who share a passion for the 19th century author, defining themselves as Janeites and coming together at special events to recite Austen’s work while wearing Regency-style costumes.

Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles, 1993, is one of his most celebrated works of art. Consisting of 40,000 individual terracotta figures, it is the largest single artwork in the Arts Council Collection and is currently on display at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art at National Glass Centre, the first time Gormley has exhibited in Sunderland. 

Antony Gormley is renowned for his distinctive representations of the human form. He has become one of Britain’s best-known artists, creating sculptures, installations and public artworks which explore the body, relationships, space, consciousness and collectivity. 

During the late 1980s, Gormley began to delve into his interest in multiple and collaborative pieces, marking a turning point in his practice with a different approach to looking at and making the human form. The first Field was made in 1989 and consisted of 150 figures made by the artist and his studio assistants. Versions of Field were subsequently made in Australia, Mexico, Sweden, Brazil and China. With each iteration Gormley moved away from making small scale versions to larger, more immersive installations such as Asian Field, created in the Guangdong Province of China and comprises over 200,000 figures.

This month’s Artist Profile focuses on Liv Preston, whose works DOG QUEST, 2020, and Casual(ty?), 2021, were recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection. DOG QUEST is currently included in the exhibition Right About Now at No.9 Cork Street in London and Casual(ty?) features in Where There’s Space to Grow at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.

Born in Keighley and raised in Bradford, Liv Preston is heavily influenced by the material language of West Yorkshire. Combined with her obsessive interest in video gaming, the subterranean and science fiction publications such as 2000 AD, her practice primarily manifests as a combination of sculpture and conceptual gestures. Collections of objects are identified and mined, employing their unique material qualities and contexts. Their forms of display often resist and chew on traditional ways of installing art, as well as the politics surrounding these gestures. They imply mischief or danger in their presentation, deliberately undermining themselves in relation to their environments.

Cast from the slate window sill of an outbuilding at Pen Yr Orsedd, an abandoned quarry in North Wales, DOG QUEST documents a piece of graffiti of a dog's head. Discovered originally by a friend of the artist, a team was assembled to travel 240 miles to investigate the drawing in situ. By establishing the production of the work as a quest, the outcome exists as something closer to a treasure or relic than simply a record of a surface. It is a nod to the representation and consistent presence of dogs within human culture, while also pondering the closeness, or sometimes violence of this relationship. The members of DOG QUEST are Karl Fisher, Millie Leyton, Sam Keelan, Kobby Adi, Cat Tandy, Rowan Rossetter.

Maggi Hambling CBE is a visual artist largely known for her intimate portraits, sea paintings and public sculptures including A Conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998), Scallop (2003) celebrating the composer Benjamin Britten, and most recently A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft (2020).

This month’s Artist Profile focuses on Hambling’s prolific career and her work Drawing from life: back view (1965), which is currently on view in Seen, a National Partners Programme Exhibition at The Exchange in Penzance.

Hambling made this early work during a life drawing class at the Camberwell School of Art in the mid-1960’s. Hambling has continued to explore the human form in some of her work and she is celebrated for her portraits of friends, family and famous figures, some of which are held in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

In the Bloomberg film Brilliant Ideas: Maggi Hambling featuring the artist and her exhibition Touch: Works on Paper at the British Museum in 2016, Hambling talks about how drawing is at the centre of her practice. Art critic Louisa Buck explains that drawing is the absolute starting point of Hambling’s work and that she makes a drawing every morning. As the title of the British Museum exhibition references, touch is important to Hambling’s work. It is through touch and the physical making of the work that Hambling understands her subject. Her intense eye translates her subject in utmost detail, capturing all emotion and liveliness on paper.

Miranda Forrester explores the queer Black female gaze in painting and addresses the invisibility of women of colour in the history of art. She is one of the newly acquired artists to the Arts Council Collection and her work The Muses (After Tamara de Lempicka), 2018, features in the National Partners Programme Exhibition, Where There’s Space to Grow at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.

This exhibition is curated by the Celebrate Different Collective, Sunderland Culture’s Young Art Leaders.  The group chose artworks from the Arts Council Collection that they felt revealed stories that encourage us to dig deep by reflecting on the past or looking ahead to a shared progressive future.

Miranda Forrester’s work is a key part of the young curators’ exhibition which asks: how can we create space for all of us to grow? Forrester’s practice investigates how her identity affects the way she portrays her subjects and how her paintings can rearticulate the language and history of life drawing through a queer Black feminist desiring lens.

In a recent interview, the artist explains: “I feel it is rare to see any representations within the history of art that are relatable and authentic. Even when there are paintings of black womxn, mixed race womxn, or people of colour, they are not painted by those same people, it’s always someone else’s voice. It’s important that everyone has their place in art history and can see themselves in works and can feel like they relate to the people in those paintings.”

This month, Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 opens after much anticipation at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This is the first survey of post-war British sculpture by women, exploring the work of over forty sculptors selected from the Arts Council Collection.

The Touring Exhibition provides a radical recalibration of art history, addressing the many accounts of British sculpture that have marginalised women. Instead, the women sculptors’ critical work is at the forefront of the exhibition, illustrating the strength and range of their use of materials, subjects, and approaches.

Artist Rana Begum is one of over forty artists featured in this exhibition. In our latest film, the Arts Council Collection visited Begum in her studio where she talks about her practice and her approach to sculpture that began with her research into light and form.

Rana Begum creates sculptural works inspired by minimalism, urban architecture and her early childhood memories of traditional Islamic art. For her ongoing series Fold, Begum works with industrial materials including powder-coated aluminium and steel to create wall-mounted sculptures of an origami-like construction, blurring the line between sculpture, painting and architecture. Begum states, “One of the great things about being an artist is that you have this amazing array of materials that you can use, nothing is off limits. I’m in this position where I’ve been able to work with as many different materials as possible.”

This month we highlight John Walter who recently presented at the Kickstarter event for the National Partners Programme Youth Collaborative Project. Having just returned from his residency at Kavli Institute in the Netherlands, Walter was able to join the online event and give a presentation on his recent projects, his works in the Collection, and signature approach to making for the young people in attendance from their respective groups at Sunderland Culture, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, and Firstsite, Colchester. 

John Walter’s work encompasses a diverse range of media, including painting, drawing, artist’s books, sculpture, costume, performance, video, sound, installation, spatial design and curating. His oeuvre is characterised by an exuberant use of colour and pattern, what he calls a maximalist approach, in addition to an absurdist and tragicomic use of humour. He works in series, producing iterative bodies of work that accumulate to form large and distinct projects,  as he explains “my work begins as a visual diary, which rapidly gives way to a form of autoethnographic painting; I create pictorial fictions that conflate my personal narratives with the voices of others. Images and phrases gathered in books become the building blocks for surreal hybrids, which then become scaffolding for larger drawn compositions, then paintings, videos and ultimately installations.”

Walter often collaborates with individuals and institutions such as other artists, scientists and museums in order to exchange images, ideas and narratives. The 17 works by Walter in the Arts Council Collection, which include works on paper, paintings, sculpture, costumes and video, are a testament to one such collaboration: CAPSID (2018–19) of 250 artworks, was the result of a collaboration between the artist and molecular virologist Professor Greg Towers of University College London. 

This month we focus on Evan Ifekoya, whose work The Gender Song is featured in the National Partners Programme exhibition Paint the Town in Sound at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens.

Paint the Town in Sound explores the direct links forged between musicians and artists taking Sunderland based band Field Music’s own collaborations as a starting point to explore wider trends. The exhibition questions how we engage in acts of self-portraiture through music, be this through songwriting, use of visual art or associations to music subcultures, and how the musical heritage of the region provides a route to examine our own cultural identity and its relationship to class, politics and place.

In our latest educational film, Evan Ifekoya invited the Arts Council Collection into their studio at Gasworks in South London to discuss their works in the collection, how they are collecting their own archive, and their wider practice. 

Evan Ifekoya is a London-based artist who through sound, text, moving image and performance places demands on existing systems and institutions of power, to recentre and prioritise the experience and voice of those previously marginalised. Sound plays a fundamental role in their work.

Their practice considers art as a site where resources can be both redistributed and renegotiated, while challenging the implicit rules and hierarchies of public and social space. Through archival and sonic investigations, they speculate on blackness in abundance.

Ikefoya explains “I spend a lot of time looking into the archives of artists I really admire, but also archives of the experience of black queer folk. I’m kind of interested in the resonances, the connections and the distinctions between how we have lived and how we continue.”

Ingrid Pollard’s work Pastoral Interlude No.4 and Pastoral Interlude No. 5 are currently included in the National Partners Programme exhibition My name is not Refugee at Firstsite, Colchester. Due to government guidelines, the gallery is closed to the public but the exhibition will be accessible to view online via a new 360˚ virtual walkthrough.

Ingird Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, she grew up in London. Early in her career, she worked at a women’s screen printing collective and was part of a group of British artists who championed black creative practice. Since starting to work as an artist in the 1980s, Pollard has developed a social practice that investigates representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens-based media work. She has an ongoing interest in the English landscape and coastline, and through her combination of photography and printmaking, she questions the hidden histories of the rural, its colonial relationship to Africa and the Carribean, as well as the notions of home and belonging.

In the series of photographs Pastoral Interlude, the artist reflects on her experience of being a black British woman in the English countryside. Britain has been traditionally represented by images of a picturesque rural scene: rolling green hills, sheep dotted across a valley or fields of golden wheat. In these idyllic scenes that offer a quiet and calm, natural repose, there is also the understanding that the British rural areas embody overwhelming whiteness. 

This month’s profile focuses on Alberta Whittle, whose work, between a whisper and a cry, 2019, is among 38 newly acquired works by 21 artists entering the Arts Council Collection in 2019/20.

Alberta Whittle’s practice aims to develop a visual, oral and textual language to question accepted Western constructs of history and society. Her work frequently reflects on the legacies of slavery, colonialism and the current climate crisis. She connects black oppression with meditations on survival, championing the idea of healing as a form of self-liberation.

At the time Whittle began making between a whisper and a cry, 2019, the Caribbean had experienced three consecutive years of devastating hurricanes and storms. The artist was struck by how people she spoke to in the UK responded apathetically to this global notion of instability, and hoped to open up conversations about what was happening in the Caribbean communities of which she is part.

The work speaks of memory, trauma and tensions between the land, the sea and the weather, revealing the precarity and privilege of geography. It explores theorist Christina Sharpe’s characterisation, in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, of ‘the weather’ as an ‘anti-black atmosphere’ in which we all live. The soundtrack and visuals seek to evoke the feeling of being caught and submerged within a wave, asking us to consider our bodies as falling beneath the threshold, and how we can come up for air when the current is dragging us under.

between a whisper and a cry was commissioned for the 2018/19 Margaret Tait Award.

Alberta Whittle is one of ten artists selected by the jury of the cancelled 2020 Turner Prize to receive a £10,000 bursary, in recognition to their significant contributions to new developments in British contemporary art.

Explore the full list of 2019/20 Acquisitions.