Newly appointed Stanley Picker Fellows artist Laura Oldfield Ford and designer Fabien Cappello will be introducing their wider practice and ideas for their Fellowship research projects in a joint lecture on Thursday 21 November in the Main Lecture Theatre of Kingston University’s Knights Park Campus, alongside the Stanley Picker Gallery. Both Fellows will be considering, in different ways, the immediate and wider geographic location of the Stanley Picker Gallery.
For her Stanley Picker Fellowship Oldfield Ford intends to undertake an investigation into the “socio-geography of the suburbs”, specifically within the old boundaries of the county of Surrey, examining marginal political and counter-cultural groups in an attempt to ascertain the effects of landscape on the collective psyche. She has been exploring the surrounding area by walking – or as she calls it “drifting” – around Kingston, Twickenham and further afield in Surrey, exploring the area and talking to people she meets en route.
“When I embark on a drift or walk-around I’ve got a vague idea of the kind of territory that I’m going to cover, but it’s very vague. I think if I was too clear in the outset of the territory or the route, it would kind of defeat the idea of the work. It is about intuition and being pulled by a curiosity or a desire about a certain place.”
Oldfield Ford will be using her newly collected material from her drifts around the Kingston area for a series of new essays, drawings and paintings which she will be making over the coming months in the Stanley Picker Gallery Project Studio.
Product and furniture designer Fabien Cappello is interested in the creative use of local resources, and has begun his research in the immediate vicinity of Kingston University, discovering what is available closest to hand, with the intention of mapping a network of artisans, and small to medium local industries. Investigating the notion of local manufacturing his research project will attempt to ask “What does ‘made locally’ mean when it is about the production of our built environment? And how, as a designer, do I intervene in or activate that process.”
Cappello’s research will focus on the public realm, using a series of case-studies representing differing scales and definitions of what ‘Made in London’ might actually mean. The project’s concentric geographies and associated publics will radiate out from the immediate area to the the wider locality of Kingston upon Thames, and South West, Central and Greater London. Each case-study will comprise an inventory of local resources, and the design and production of a piece of work that highlights new possibilities in manufacturing our shared environment.