As part of Maeve Brennan’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project An Excavation, a series of workshops and tours are taking place at Stanley Picker Gallery. At our partner venue, Dorich House Museum, another artist, Nadia Hebson is in residence, creating new pieces inspired by the history and architecture of sculptor Dora Gordine’s studio home.
On Saturday 25 June, Martin Glover will lead a British Sign Language tour of the exhibition at the Gallery. Visitors booked on the tour will then be transported to the Museum, to view Hebson’s interventions across the Museum and the impressive site in general. Refreshments will be included The tour will end at the Museum where transport back in to Kingston can be arranged or alternative public transport advised.
An Excavation consists of a new body of work derived from Maeve Brennan’s long-term research project The Goods. In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. Three of the crates were sent to forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis (Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies) and Dr Vinnie Norskov (Director of Aarhus Museum of Ancient Art) for research. Carried out in collaboration with Tsirogiannis, the multidisciplinary project is concerned with the international traffic in looted antiquities. Brennan’s works trace the circulation of objects through layered temporalities, focusing on figures such as restorers, joyriders and smugglers whose material actions and practices tie them to wider networks, histories and economies. Brennan has an ongoing commitment to working slowly with people to allow complex narratives to form, attending to the thick and entangled nature of her chosen subjects, and a central outcome of this is her major new film commission An Excavation (2022). Read more.
Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker, based in London, appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2019. Working with moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her practice explores the political and historical resonance of material and place. Brennan is currently participating in British Art Show 9 and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2021. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID (Official Competition 2018). Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013 -14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.
Nadia Hebson was selected as Dorich House Museum’s third Studio Resident through a public open call. Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic limited travel and the museum was closed to the public, Hebson continued to work remotely, and her work is now being presented her work as part of their 2022 programme. Working obliquely with the legacy of women artists, Hebson has sought to comprehend the relationship between painting, biography, persona and clothing, through a consideration of the work of older colleagues including: Winifred Knights Christina Ramberg and Monica Sjöö. Hebson’s practice spans the mediums of painting, sculpture and relief and text which can be subjective, poetic, or academic in tone. Read more.
Martin Glover is a Deaf Architect and an established BSL tour guide and facilitator in galleries and museums, covering a wide spectrum of themes including architecture, art and social issues. He is currently part of the cohort on Engage’s Extend Leadership programme, researching the theme of inclusion and leadership. As a recent co-founder of the Digitspace project, he secured a grant to lead a nationwide social cohesion programme to increase deaf awareness in arts venues whilst running workshops to encourage deaf people to become guides in these venues.
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