This month, Collections Assistant, Louise Smith, explores the work of Prunella Clough, whose work features in the latest Arts Council Collection touring exhibition The Printed Line.

Clough was born in London in 1919, she studied at Chelsea School of Art and during the war worked as a cartographer for the Office of War Information, producing charts and maps. In Clough’s early work she painted industrial landscapes, focussing on the labour taking place in these landscapes, describing details such as the drivers in the lorry cabs, and the men climbing cranes on the building sites. Clough didn’t belong to a group of artists and was quite isolated in the way she worked. During the 60s and 70s Clough started to hone in on certain aspects of the urban wasteland - reflecting on everyday discarded objects and mundane vignettes. These objects and scenes became more abstracted later in her career.

Clough is known mainly for her paintings but she also made prints and created assemblages from collected objects. Clough made notes on scenes and colours of a landscape, and always carried a camera which she used not for reproducing but to capture the atmosphere and feel of a landscape, compositions and shapes of unnoticed objects to create her own visual language. During her teaching at Chelsea School of Art in 1954, Clough started to use etchings to create simple images - it was a new medium for her and she drew through the hard ground etching plate to create a series of line drawings. Most of these etchings were unrelated to Clough’s paintings and industrial scenes at the time and she did not edition these prints. She later brought the technique back into her practice.

Curator Ann Jones on Eduardo Paolozzi, whose work features in current Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition, The Printed Line.

Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 - 2005) began working with printmaking in the early 1950s and his comment that a good reproduction is better than a poor original underlines the importance he gave to the medium.

In 1962 Paolozzi began to collaborate with Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios and during the 1960s he pushed printmaking to its extremes, breaking new ground by adapting commercial screenprinting techniques to suit his own needs and experimenting with different colour combinations in each edition.

His series of screenprints from the mid-1960s, such as Universal Electronic Vacuum: Horizon of Expectation (pictured), are among the most innovative graphic art of the decade.

Drawing on various aspects of modern mass society as well as Paolozzi's own collection of ephemera, they bring together imagery as diverse as Mickey Mouse, Wittgenstein, aeronautics and contemporary politics, interspersed with intricate blocks of patterns and texts, all in brilliant combinations of colours, which look just as vivid and relevant today.

Paolozzi developed many of his ideas through his screenprints, fashioning a collage of diverse references into a unified whole. In this, as in his different forms of sculpture and writings, he constantly reinvented himself, while maintaining a distinctive sense of continuity. Few other artists have explored such a wide range of ways of interpreting the modern world over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years.

Universal Electronic Vacuum: Horizon of Expectation, 1967 can be seen as part of Arts Council Collections latest Touring Exhibition, The Printed Line.

Heather Welsh, Marketing Officer for the Arts Council Collection, explores the work of Heather Phillipson, whose work TRUE TO SIZE shows as part of Too Cute! Sweet is about to get Sinister, an Arts Council Collection National Partners Exhibition curated by Rachel Maclean.

Working across video, sculpture, drawing, music, text and live events, artist Heather Phillipson’s immersive works are full of cultural references, emotional responses revealing an intimate dialogue with the materials she uses.

Her commission for the Arts Council Collection’s 70th anniversary, TRUE TO SIZE, is a suite made of multiple video and audio refrains, constructed within a series of sculptural vignettes. Visually, it includes oversized, printed emojis and human scale soft toys which Phillipson describes as “kind of surrogate, genderless beings, which for me also has to do with care, human-animal relations and of course fantasy, all of which are recurring themes within my work”.

As well as these themes, Phillipson also heavily references the language of the Internet and indeed advertising. She explains; “I’ve called the commission TRUE TO SIZE, a slogan which is of course taken from advertising or product packaging, because it’s really subjecting scale, as an objective fact as both a physical and virtual property, by which I mean, emotions as much as perceived dimensions, to various kinds of pressures.” Both the work’s visual register and its materials are sourced from the Internet.

This month, Rachel Graves, Collections Coordinator (Longside) writes about the work of British artist Veronica Ryan, whose Collection series shows as part of ACC Touring exhibition In My Shoes.

Veronica Ryan is a British artist who divides her time between the UK and New York. She is best known for her sculptural works which are made from materials including plaster, lead, bronze, textiles, and found objects and often incorporate organic forms such as large seed pods and fruit. Throughout her career Ryan has explored the cultural dynamics and psychological impact of place and migration, which she has experienced directly in her own life, having moved from the Caribbean island of Montserrat to Britain with her family as a child. Within her works, pod-like shapes are often contained and cushioned within larger forms, grouped together as if they are a collection of carefully assembled devotional objects. Her work has been included in several major Arts Council Collection touring exhibitions, including Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986.

Lamentations in the Garden (2000) which can currently be seen in In My Shoes: Art & the Self since the 1990s is a series in which Ryan altered a family photograph of herself and her sister standing in the family’s back garden in London, overpainting and concealing parts of the image in white acrylic paint and black ink. The piece is one part of a wider body of work the artist produced during a residency at Tate St Ives between 1998 and 2000. The Cornish landscape around St Ives felt to Ryan strongly reminiscent of the Caribbean island of Montserrat where she was born, and this prompted the artist to revisit some of her earliest childhood memories in the work that resulted.

Working with photographs was, at the time, a new addition to Ryan’s practice. The immediacy of the photographic image and its relationship to memory had a strong relevance to the subject matter that she was exploring at this time:

“After the death of a second sibling, both due to suicide, I wanted to find a direct way in my work to deal with that particular kind of loss and grief; this was the only way.”

In My Shoes: Art & the Self since the 1990s is currently showing at the RSC’s PACCAR Room and tours throughout 2019 to venues in Wales and Nottinghamshire.

Through drawings, sculptures and texts, Scottish artist Charles Avery’s ongoing project, The Islanders, explores the topology, cosmology and inhabitants of an imagined island.

Charles Avery’s Arts Council Collection work, Untitled (Bar of the Egg Eating Egret), 2010, is included in the Collection’s latest touring exhibition, The World We Live In: Art and the Urban Environment.

The World We Live In, which opens this month at Leicester Museum & Art Gallery (until 2 May), explores some of the many facets of urban life that have been a rich source of inspiration to artists throughout history. The exhibition brings together modern and contemporary works which variously consider how city dwellers engage with their built-up surroundings, through both real and imagined urban spaces.

Charles Avery’s drawing, Untitled (Bar of the Egg Eating Egret), 2010, which features in the exhibition, is part of Avery’s epic project entitled ‘The Islanders’ in which he explores an imaginary island and everything it contains through the eyes of an explorer.

Described by the artist as a 'philosophical allegory', The Islanders project, which Avery embarked on in 2004, takes as its subject an elaborate fictional territory, from the market of the main town Onomatopoeia to the Eternal Forest where an unknown beast called the Noumenon is held to reside.

The Islanders is an encyclopaedic investigation of an imaginary island and everything it contains, its people, customs, mythology, human history and natural history as seen through the eyes of an explorer.

This particular work depicts a bar where Only McPhew, the protagonist of the fiction, hatches a plan to capture the Noumenon, in the name of his love for Miss Miss, the female protagonist. The project can be read as a meditation on the philosophy of art-making and the world of ideas.

Relaxed, powerful and beautiful, Johnson’s oversized portraits demand respect. Her subjects are unconstrained by the boundaries of the canvas, wear deep colours and make unwavering eye contact with the viewer. Johnson describes the women in her paintings as "monoliths, larger than life versions of women".

Whilst studying fine art in Wolverhampton, Johnson became a founder member of the Blk Art Group in 1979 alongside other young black British artists including Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter. The group came to be known for artworks that highlighted Britain’s imperial past, institutional racism and the abuse of power.

Taking on European traditions of painterly, psychological portraiture, Johnson’s work deposes the genre’s traditionally male and white gaze. In opposition to the invisibility or objectification of the black female body in the history of art, her sitters are complex, active subjects with rich interior lives.

The three paintings that make up Claudette Johnson’s Arts Council Collection series, Trilogy, 1982-86, are among the works featured in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s forthcoming National Partners exhibition, Women Power Protest. Marking a century since the first women won the right to vote, 'Women Power Protest' brings together modern and contemporary artworks from the Arts Council Collection and Birmingham’s own collection to celebrate female artists who have explored protest, social commentary and identity in their work.

Showcasing pieces by celebrated artists including Susan Hiller, Lubaina Himid, and Mary Kelly, as well as sometimes controversial artists such as Sam Taylor-Johnson, Sonia Boyce, and Margaret Harrison, the exhibition will not shy away from difficult subjects, nor underplay the genius behind these artworks. Inspired by the bold work of feminist artists and activists, Women Power Protest will raise awareness, provoke debate and ask just how much has changed for women?

Emalee Beddoes-Davis is Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Birmingham Museums Trust.

Women Power Protest is at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 10 November until 31 March 2019.

Sara Cooper, Head of Collections at Towner Art Gallery writes about the work of artist Abigail Lane whose Collection work Ink Pad 1 is currently showing as part of their National Partnership exhibition the Everyday and Extraordinary.

Artist Abigail Lane studied at Goldsmiths College, before becoming one of the key figures in the Young British Artists (YBA) movement. She was part of the seminal 1988 Freeze exhibition, organised by Damien Hirst with fellow Goldsmiths students including Anya Gallaccio, Michael Landy and Sarah Lucas. Lane left London in 2007 to live and work in Suffolk. As well as exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally she is also a curator. Notably, between 2000 and 2015 she curated the contemporary visual art exhibition SNAP, part of Suffolk’s Aldeburgh Festival.

Abigail Lane’s work is predominantly sculpture and installation based but spans a range of medium including video, sound, and photography, as well as found objects, print and text.  Her work often explores dark or sinister themes but does so with a wry, mischievous humour that makes it both intriguing and engaging.

Ahead of the next national touring exhibition Criminal Ornamentation opening later this month, Beth Hughes, Curator, Arts Council Collection explores the work of Lis Rhodes, who features in the exhibition. 'It is dangerous to step out of line - and lethal not to.' Lis Rhodes

Since the early 1970s, Lis Rhodes has been a pioneer of avant-garde film in Britain. She is a founding member of the women’s film and video distribution company Circles, established in 1979, which was set up to address how women filmmakers had been marginalised. Due to their abstract visual language Rhodes’ films defy description, words cannot touch the visceral experience of her carefully crafted combination of sound and image. In an article published in Frieze magazine in 2012, Rhodes describes how the American writer Gertrude Stein’s masterful deconstruction of structured language infiltrates her work. “She [Stein] unravels syntax”, and indeed in her own work, Rhodes unravels the film format.

Stein’s words take centre stage in Light Reading (1978), a work acquired by the Arts Council Collection in 2015. The film begins with darkness as a woman’s voice reads extracts written by Stein. When the voice stops, a loose narrative takes shape from a series of collaged photographs, including one of a bloodstained bed. The soundtrack encourages us to look and look again, words pointing to image and the image referring back to the words in a cyclical, mutually dependant relationship.

Arts Council Collection Curator, Ann Jones explores Kate Davis’ Who is a Woman now? I, 2008, one of the works featured in our touring exhibition, On Paper, which has been shown at venues across the UK throughout 2018, and continues until spring 2019.

Kate Davis works across a range of media, specifically drawing, collage and sculpture. The subjects in her artworks often reference the human body, and emerge disjointed and distorted. She frequently responds to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical artworks and their reception.

Who is a Woman now? I is a delicate pencil drawing of what seems to be a crumpled postcard, folded in half like a body bent from the waist and flanked with a dense black background. The reproduction bears resemblance to a Willem de Kooning painting from his seminal Woman series (1951-53), and the address of the Modern Museum of Modern Art, New York, features along the edge. De Kooning’s representations of women were perceived by some to be menacing and objectifying, with their snarling expressions painted with wild brushstrokes, leading to accusations of misogyny. Davis’s depiction of the ruined image suggests protest from her standpoint as a female artist working today.

Who is a Woman now? I, 2008 will be showing in On Paper at Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham from 28 July - 22 September 2018 before moving on to Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea from 29 September - 25 November 2018.

It is one of the three drawings in the exhibition that are of paper, on paper. The other works are Books from the Museum of the White Horse Library, Non-Fiction by Tania Kovats and National Film Theatre, 2000 by Derek Boshier.

On Paper is an Arts Council Collection touring exhibition. After Swansea it will tour to Bath and Honiton until April 2019.

Emma Hart’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, video, photography and performance. Her recent ceramic pieces possess an unruly aesthetic and are often autobiographical.

Fork Face (2017) is a vivid yellow satellite dish, one of ten which were displayed at Frieze London 2017 in a presentation titled Commercial Breakz. Here, the plethora of satellite dishes were mounted to a wall, much like an arrangement sometimes found on the exterior of a block of flats. Each dish is individually decorated, representing Hart’s ongoing investigation into pattern, from visual design to our own ruminative behaviours. For Fork Face, the artist portrays herself surrounded by protruding forks. She is simultaneously being propped up, and prodded, suggestive of the everyday stresses and discomforts of the human experience.

This piece is part of a body of work by Emma Hart, which is a continuation of some of the themes explored in Mamma Mia!, her solo exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery in 2017. Mamma Mia! was the result of her research and time spent in Italy after she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Hart spent two months in Milan, observing families attending therapy sessions at the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli, in which therapists explore the cycles of behaviour within family groups. The second part of the residency was spent in Faenza, where the artist learnt many of the skills synonymous with the ceramic traditions of the city. Both aspects of the Max Mara residency culminated in creating Mamma Mia!, an installation that explored pattern, from visual patterns to patterns of psychological behaviour. The work also considered the design and rupture of pattern and the ruminations in between.

Fork Face can be seen at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as part of the Arts Council Collection Touring exhibition In My Shoes: Art & the Self Since the 1990s, until 17 June 2018.