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Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities Newsletter
Image credit: Yellow House, by John Devane
CAMC Curates is the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities newsletter with suggestions and news from our expert and engaged researchers.
Place Setting #1 by Jill Journeaux
Photo: Jill Journeaux, Place Setting, 2020
This project uses practice to consider how the table settings that we use in our own homes can bring together a range of places, people and remembered experiences. As the boundaries of my own home have shrunk in recent weeks and travel has been severely curtailed, I have been aware of the items that I have selected for place settings. These have come from other countries that I have spent time in and have travelled to my home on airplanes and boats, have been made by people I love, or were selected and used by my parents and grandparents. I have brought them together as reminders of other places, times and experiences, and through the physical experience of eating from and with them I can expand the places that I currently occupy beyond the limitations of my front door.
Carolina Rito recommends...
Black Arts Movement in Coventry #1
In the 1980s, the Midlands were home to the advent of one of the most radical art movements in the UK, the Black Arts Movement. It’s in Coventry that two of the most representative artists of the movement meet. Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper were students in the Art Foundation course at the Coventry Polytechnic, in 1979, and went on to create the Blk Art Group with Marlene Smith, Donald Rodney and Claudette Johnson.
The group returns to Coventry in 1983 for the Pan-Afrikan Connection exhibition held at the Herbert Gallery and Museum. The catalogue of the exhibition and other publications are available on the Blk Art Group website.
More recently, the research project Black Artists and Modernism (AHRC), led by artist and researcher Sonia Boyce, delved into the understudied and understated connections between “Black-British artists’ practice and the work of art’s relationship to Modernism through close readings of works of art, artist dossiers, interviews, study days, public symposia and a database of works of art in public collections across the UK.”
On Covid-19 #1
Achille Mbembe’s text “The Universal Right to Breathe” (2020) reminds us that with Covid-19 outbreak “a vicious partitioning of the globe will intensify, and the dividing lines will become even more entrenched.” “The Universal Right to Breathe” gains yet another meaning against the background of George Floyd killing and consequent protests across the globe.
Lockdown Musings by Dr Imogen Racz
Dr Imogen Racz discusses the various ways that materials and the objects she lives with form part of an embodied sense of self. She draws on ideas from different writers and philosophers, including Edmund Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
Prof. Juliet Simpson recommends…
Rijksmuseum from home
Rijksmuseum from home is a series of short films of curator talks on key objects in the Rijksmuseum collection. The talks offer close-ups on an individual object within the collections, creating via a journey of art, materiality and broader cultural insights, succinct and illuminating insights into the intimate lives of objects and the questions they invite.
With minimal digital overlay, each talk makes ‘at home’ with the curator a refreshingly and convincingly present encounter.
Wellbeing tips for working from home
• Thirty minutes reading of an inspirational writer before start of working day
• If weather is favourable, catch the light and take a sun ‘bath’ mid-morning;
• Alternate days, 30-mins brush-up on learning a language;
• Create clear boundaries between screen, work/study and reading for pleasure/relaxation;
• Put your legs up, stretching every hour.
