Snapshot 07: Tales from the Fine Art Studio

PRESS RELEASE

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Snapshot presents Snapshot 07: Tales from the Fine Art Studio. Led by their academic tutor Maggie Ayliffe, students from Level 5 Fine Art have been tasked to unpick and ‘reverse engineer’ paintings from the John Moores Painting Prize collection from the selection currently on display at the Walker Art Gallery. Through recreating 12” square sections of a chosen painting, each artist has undertaken a process of research, trial, and experimatation. This ‘Snapshot’ reveals some of the testing that led to their final outcomes, uncovering the making process and a story of the studio that is often left out within exhibition making.

Not only has this project allowed for probing of techniques and processes, but also an examination of the role of collections and archives as teaching tools. Studying work collected over the past 7 decades of the John Moores Painting Prize has allowed the students to gather new methodologies that can be used to develop their own studio practices further. Many art schools have art collections, some specifically named as teaching collections. Often today this work doesn’t sit in the corridors of our buildings but has been scurried away to stores and the safe walls of offices. We have perhaps forgotten the need to live with work, to really see and understand making as practice and making as meaning in the artwork.

Deconstructing and citing work from a purposefully selected collection has enabled the artists and curators involved in Snapshot 07: Tales from the Fine Art Studio to experience this embodied mode of research. In turn, their attention has produced a new interpretation for this collection of paintings as a teaching resource.

Exhibiting Artists:
Rhi Bevan
Jessie Birkett
Indie Budd
Erin Burrows
India Clarke
George Flynn
M Harrison
Rachel Marchbank
Bethan Roux
Abbie Taylor

Curatorial Team for this edition:
Francesca Fryer
Sophie Donovan
Amy Dcruze
Rosie Topman

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