Inspired by Stanley Picker Fellow Alumni, Richard Trupp
Featuring sites in Kingston, Epsom, Australia and South Africa
From the start of this academic year to present, Stanley Picker Gallery has been collaborating with Epsom Primary and King Athelstan Primary to deliver a weekly Art Club for children from mixed classes across Key Stage 2. Our inspiration since the turn of the year has been 20 years of Stanley Picker Gallery.
Art Clubbers S/S 2017: Ava, Calvin, Edie, Gasser, Jess, Laiba, Louisa, Mikaela and Ringo, with Mrs Allan, and Banah, Charlotte, Emma, Georgie, Honey, Klaudia, Maurice, Ryan, Shanaya, Tafi and Tom with Mrs Barr.
During the programme, with workshops tailored to meet the interests and requirements of individual groups, the young artists named above have been investigating the history of Stanley Picker Gallery – our founding, exhibitions and fellowships. They have learnt about contemporary artists’ and designers’ practice, influences and creative processes, while sharing their personal interpretations, ideas and preoccupations through free-writing, drawing, collage, sculpture, zine-making and animated discussion.
This term our main artist in focus has been sculptor Richard Trupp, who as Stanley Picker Fellow in 2000 turned the gallery into a ‘flat-pack’ with the creation of bronze-cast fixing blocks – some of which can be spyed outside of the gallery today as permanently installed artworks. Inspired by Trupp, pupils designed and pitched to their peers, proposals new site-specific sculpture in areas of the borough and beyond that they feel to be in need of “jazzing up” or “earning the respect of people by giving them something better to look at, something to make the people smile”. While designing, we listened to music from 2000 and pondered if these might have been the same tunes that blasted from Trupps old-fashioned radio during the install of his fellowship piece! Art Clubbers constructed maquettes from metals, wood and wire, before photographing and photoshopping them into their intended sites as the works might be viewed by the public. Finally, these images were uploaded to google maps and pin-dropped to the relevant location – why not have a search online, see what you can find!
Trupp also happens to be head of the 3D workshops at Kingston School of Art at Kingston University where many of the Gallery’s Fellows experiment and make their work, alongside students. Both groups visited the workshops during a special visit to see graduating students Degree Show exhibition and the current exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery. Some of the young artists were lucky enough to meet and interview the man himself, who was impressed by the design ideas of all young artists.
To view the outcomes of other 20 years projects, please click here. A selection of images can also be viewed in the Stanley Picker Gallery lobby from 30 June 2017.