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Learning Pathways Workshop & Collaboration: Call to artists

29 October 2021

4 mins

Rachel RECKITT (1908-1995), Spanish Refugee Family, 1940, RAF Museum

LEARNING PATHWAYS / CALL TO ARTISTS

Our 2021-22 drawing workshop will be held in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, British Museum and RAF Museum Colindale and combines opportunities for in-person and on-line engagement with the Collections at all three venues across the full year.

Please take a moment to read and consider the course outline below. For a full programme and information relating to fees and registration, please contact Dr. Glenn Sujo, Course Leader, Learning Pathways at tracesandintervals@gmail.com.

MEDITATIONS: AMID CRISIS, WANTING REPAIR

A group of drawings by a seldom acknowledged circle of women artists — among them, Enid Abrahams, Elsie Gledstanes, Laura Knight, Olga Lehman, Rachel Reckitt — reveal a prescient awareness of civic responses to, and activism in the face of Britain at War (1939-45). Often working in isolation, lacking official or financial support, overlooked by Kenneth Clarke’s War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), they persisted in efforts to record such subjects as the arrival of Spanish refugees fleeing Civil War in their country, civil defences, the comings and goings in the Cabinet War Rooms, domesticity, interrupted intimacy. We ask, how do their stories and the singularity of their response to crisis underscore a resistant message today?

Their works offer a revealing parallel with Henry Moore’s much heralded wartime studies of Londoners sheltering from aerial bombardment: the so-called Shelter Sketchbooks. His abject figures, fatigued and wrapped in blankets, mill about or sleep, their heavy limbs and recumbent poses recalling a western humanist tradition present in the works of Andrea Mantegna and Jacopo Bellini in the sixteenth century. How did Moore’s Sketchbooks assume the status of national memorial? What are their implications for the formation of a national identity in the twenty-first century?

This extended, year-long workshop asks us to consider how the recent pandemic has shaped our responses to society and fellow beings. How has the national mood been shaped by an awareness of response to earlier crises? How do those responses in turn help build a contextual awareness of the time we live and work in as artists today?   What strategies might we employ when invoking a language of heightened emotion and why? How might we broach subjects of such magnitude (pandemic, climate emergency, war) and henceforth, reinvigorate a tradition of humanitarian response to crisis through the human figure?

© Learning Pathways, 2021 

MEDITATIONS: AMID CRISIS, WANTING REPAIR

TERM I (Autumn Term)

DAY 1

2.00 – 4:00 pm, Thursday 11 November (Zoom)

Online presentation and discussion of the year ahead, its objectives and intended gains, reading lists and digital resources, access to the Collections.

DAY 2

10:00 — 5:00pm, Thursday 2 December (In Person)

Encounter with and drawing from the Collections at RAF Museum, Colindale. Visit to

“In Air and Fire: War Artists, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz” exhibition. Sessions led

by Julia Beaumont Jones, Senior Curator, Fine Art, and Dr. Glenn Sujo, course convenor.

TERM II (Spring Term)

DAY 3

2.00 – 4:00 pm Date to be confirmed (Zoom).

Online presentation and discussion of ‘Henry Moore’s Shelter Sketchbooks:

National Symbol or Memorial for a New Age?’ (various contributors).

DAY 4

10:00 — 5:00pm Date to be confirmed (In Person).

Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum. Encounter with, analysis of and drawing from a selection of drawings including Henry Moore’s Shelter Sketchbook I, and his contemporaries. Assisted by British Museum curatorial staff.

TERM III (Summer Term)

DAY 5

2.00 – 4:00 pm Online presentation (Zoom, date and time to be confirmed)

DAY 6

10:00 — 5:00pm Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, Herts.

Encounter with and drawing from a curated selection of archival materials, film and photography including drawings from Moore’s second Shelter Sketchbook II. Assisted by Henry Moore Foundation curatorial staff and Glenn Sujo. Closing discussion.

OPTIONAL

DAY 7

10:00 — 5:00pm Date and venue to be confirmed (In-Person).

Review and peer critique of the work produced by delegates through the year.

Closing discussion, assessment, course evaluation and feedback.

For further information, registration and course guidance please contact:

Dr. Glenn Sujo, Course Leader, Learning Pathways at tracesandintervals@gmail.com.

DRAWING RESEARCH NETWORK

hosted by TRACEY at Loughborough University

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