Stanley Picker Gallery’s 2018 appointed Fellows in Design The Decorators will be holding their inaugural Fellowship Talk on Wednesday 13 March 5pm, in the Kingston School of Art Main Lecture Theatre. They will discuss their practice as an interdisciplinary design collective, current research and making, and plans for their exhibition at the Gallery.

With backgrounds in landscape architecture, spatial design, curation and psychology, The Decorators work on spatial design projects that aim to reconnect the physical elements of a place with its social dimension. Their projects can be read as the testing of possible infrastructures for communal life, designing programmes and physical elements for a space that turns an individual into a collective. In particular they have produced tables, seating configurations and frameworks for collective eating. Commensality – eating and drinking at the same table, is a fundamental social activity, which creates and cements relationships, but which can also defy dominant power structures. For The Decorators, the act of eating is a political act.

During their fellowship they want to consolidate this experience and build an inventory of objects and situations that produce collective experiences based on the consumption of food. By staging a series of design experiments both in and outside of the Stanley Picker Gallery, in collaboration with students and the local community, The Decorators seek to develop a series of observations, situations and working sculptures which they will exhibit, use, photograph, draw and compile into a catalogue of (political) commensality.

This event is open to everyone, and requires no booking. Following the talk we welcome all to join us for drinks at Stanley Picker Gallery, 6-7pm.

Stanley Picker Fellow in Fine Art Erika Tan, also appointed in 2018, will present in the same location on Wednesday 20 March, 5pm.