Stanley Picker Gallery is delighted to be hosting the third instalment Her Art-Story – a programme of conversations between female artists, curators and gallerists, devised by Matt Roberts Arts. For this event, recently appointed Stanley Picker Fellow in Fine Art Erika Tan will be interviewed about her practice and plans for her Fellowship by sculptor Melanie Jackson.

Matt Roberts writes

The Fine Arts are notorious for their lack of representation for women. With female artists less likely to have work sold through a gallery or achieve the highest sums at auction. The situation is changing and Her Art-Story celebrates the achievements of successful women working in the arts.

Her Art-Story is a series of intimate conversations between invited female artists and curators intended to provide inspiration to negotiate your own path in the art world or at the least have a greater understanding of female practitioners breaking new ground. All the artists at the forefront of their field share how they developed their practice and professional career and offer straightforward advice.

Her Art-Story and Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University are delighted to invite you to listen to a conversation between Melanie Jackson, artist and lecturer and Erika Tan, artist and lecturer awarded the Stanley Picker Fellow in Fine Art 2018-2020. Both their research based practices resonate with shared commonalties, including postcolonial and diaspora politics, capitalist critique and interrelated modernities.

Erika Tan’s practice as artist, lecturer and curator is primarily research-led and manifests in multiple formats: moving image, publications, curatorial and participatory projects. Recent research has focused on the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects. Future projects point towards the digitization of collective cultural memory and cloud architecture through the prism of ruins, hauntings, and mnemonic collapse. Tan’s work has been exhibited, collected and commissioned internationally including: The Diaspora Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2017); Artist and Empire (Tate Touring, National Gallery Singapore 2016/7); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You (NUS Museum, Singapore 2014); There Is No Road (LABoral, Spain 2010); Thermocline of Art (ZKM, Germany 2007); Around The World in Eighty Days (South London Gallery / ICA 2007); The Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London). Recent curatorial project: Sonic Soundings/Venice Trajectories
www.erikatan.net 
www.sonicsoundings.com

Melanie Jackson is a tutor in sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Her multidisciplinary practice involves modes of non-fiction storytelling – through space/objects/text/moving image and sound. She works with the sensorial and affective capacity of the material, and the inventive ways we reconcile or resist living with the technologies around us – produced as they are in conditions of extraction capitalism. She engages with stories of excess and the absurd imbricated in the production flows and networks of the biotechnocapital, and their ‘ur’ formation in other times and places. Jackson has recently completed a practice based PhD at the University of Reading. Her forthcoming work Hellmouth – a speculation on toxicology, will take the form an animation, a public sculpture and a lecture. It starts with mercury, dental amalgams and the origins of money. Solo exhibitions include Deeper in the Pyramid at Grand Union, (Birmingham); Primary (Nottingham) and Banner Repeater (London all 2018); The Urpflanze Part 2 (2013) and The Urpflanze Part 1 (2010) at the Drawing Room and Flat Time House, (London). She was awarded residencies in Shanghai and Hong Kong (British Council); Mauritius (Gasworks); and in the UK (University of Bristol, The Mothership). She has been shortlisted for the Whitechapel Max Mara Art Prize for Women and was a winner of the Jerwood Drawing Prize. She has work in the Tate and Government Art Collections, and in Private Collections.
www.melaniejackson.net

To book or for any further information please email: herartstorytalks@gmail.com

Also taking place in November and December 2018:
15 November: Lightbox, Woking – Althea Greenan & Barby Asante
22 November: Block 336, Brixton – Cathy Lomax & Eleanor Moreton
05 December: South Hill Park, Bracknell – Annabel Dover & Laura Lancaster

Her Art-Story is supported by Arts Council England and the National Lottery through the National Lottery Project Grants award. Programmed by artist Laura Moreton-Griffiths and arts consultant Matt Roberts.

Instagram @ herartstorytalks
Twitter @herartstories