My career as a lecturer honed some curatorial skills via countless student exhibitions and degree shows along with staff exhibitions and personal shows. For some years I devised a second year project called Beyond the Walls where the students were asked to find a venue to exhibit and then make work towards exhibiting and a private view. They found venues in vacant shops, air raid shelters, public conveniences, abandoned factories, forests, the high street and student flats amongst very many other sites. These exhibitions and private views were often designed to be not just beyond the walls of the college but also beyond the conventions of showing fine art. The prospect of an indifferent viewing public was taken on as an essential project ingredient and hence a challenge.
I joined Wells Art Contemporary committee in 2017 and helped hang the show in the Bishops Palace for next couple of years. I introduced a forum called ‘I know what I like,’ inviting the participants to look over the show and chose one artwork that they really liked and another that they disliked or felt no connection with. These forums were informal and informative, finding words and ways of unpacking a response to their chosen works. The WAC yearly exhibition moved into Wells Cathedral in 2019 and on setting out a screen configuration for two dimensional works and sculptures in the cloisters I turned my attention to installations within the main body and grounds of the Cathedral. This first show within the Cathedral had thirteen installations and was seen to be a successful formula for exhibiting.
In 2020 the pandemic brought only a virtual exhibition of the work that would have been set up in the cloisters. We were back in the Cathedral in 2021 with a physical exhibition. Installation applications hugely increased and 27 were finally placed into the Cathedral and its grounds. As one visitor stated on visiting the 2021 exhibition, “I have been following the WAC exhibitions for years and when the show moved into the Cathedral the year before last, with its installations throughout the building and gardens, along with all the pictures on screens in the cloisters it seemed like I was walking through a cultural garden and this year with so many great installations it was as if it had all come into bloom.”
Installations and Interventions
2021 WELLS ART CONTEMPORARY
28th August – 26th September – Within and in the grounds of Wells Cathedral
(extract from catalogue.)
Artists painting directly onto the fabric of a building, meaningfully and sympathetically fitting artworks into a given space significantly predates transportable pictures in frames. Going back before buildings existed, painters worked with a given, often undulating and broken surface of a cave wall. Installing an artwork into a building or setting it out in open ground, under a tree, next to a tomb, in the Nave of a Cathedral, sets a connection, a dialogue between the artwork and its immediate surroundings. With a framed painting we accept that the art ceases to operate beyond the edge of the frame yet with an installation the whole environment in which the artwork resides is brought into play as part of its meaning and context. A sculpture within the white space of a gallery is saying look at me, the rest of what is in this room is of no importance to experiencing me. The same sculpture set into a church is richly bound up with that environment. A conversation may happen with an installation where the spiritual context of the site, its physical structure, ambient light, divine evensong and a passing verger all coalesce to enact a rich and meaningful response in the viewer.
This 2021 group of installations has come about via a far more open and speculative view as to what and where it is possible to install art works inside and outside of this magnificent building.
Robin Sewell - W.A.C. Curator 2017 - 2021.
I joined Wells Art Contemporary committee in 2017 and helped hang the show in the Bishops Palace for next couple of years. I introduced a forum called ‘I know what I like,’ inviting the participants to look over the show and chose one artwork that they really liked and another that they disliked or felt no connection with. These forums were informal and informative, finding words and ways of unpacking a response to their chosen works. The WAC yearly exhibition moved into Wells Cathedral in 2019 and on setting out a screen configuration for two dimensional works and sculptures in the cloisters I turned my attention to installations within the main body and grounds of the Cathedral. This first show within the Cathedral had thirteen installations and was seen to be a successful formula for exhibiting.
In 2020 the pandemic brought only a virtual exhibition of the work that would have been set up in the cloisters. We were back in the Cathedral in 2021 with a physical exhibition. Installation applications hugely increased and 27 were finally placed into the Cathedral and its grounds. As one visitor stated on visiting the 2021 exhibition, “I have been following the WAC exhibitions for years and when the show moved into the Cathedral the year before last, with its installations throughout the building and gardens, along with all the pictures on screens in the cloisters it seemed like I was walking through a cultural garden and this year with so many great installations it was as if it had all come into bloom.”
Installations and Interventions
2021 WELLS ART CONTEMPORARY
28th August – 26th September – Within and in the grounds of Wells Cathedral
(extract from catalogue.)
Artists painting directly onto the fabric of a building, meaningfully and sympathetically fitting artworks into a given space significantly predates transportable pictures in frames. Going back before buildings existed, painters worked with a given, often undulating and broken surface of a cave wall. Installing an artwork into a building or setting it out in open ground, under a tree, next to a tomb, in the Nave of a Cathedral, sets a connection, a dialogue between the artwork and its immediate surroundings. With a framed painting we accept that the art ceases to operate beyond the edge of the frame yet with an installation the whole environment in which the artwork resides is brought into play as part of its meaning and context. A sculpture within the white space of a gallery is saying look at me, the rest of what is in this room is of no importance to experiencing me. The same sculpture set into a church is richly bound up with that environment. A conversation may happen with an installation where the spiritual context of the site, its physical structure, ambient light, divine evensong and a passing verger all coalesce to enact a rich and meaningful response in the viewer.
This 2021 group of installations has come about via a far more open and speculative view as to what and where it is possible to install art works inside and outside of this magnificent building.
Robin Sewell - W.A.C. Curator 2017 - 2021.