Date: Saturday 23 November 2019, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery
Doors open 5.45pm
Lecture 6pm
Q&A 6.45-7pm
Drinks in Gillian Lowndes exhibition 7-8pm
Doors close 8pm
Postmodernity and Clay. Reflecting on The Raw and the Cooked exhibition of 1993.
Book your tickets here.
The 2019 Annual CoCA Lecture will be delivered by Alison Britton OBE MARCA Hon Doc.
Alison Britton was part of a group of radical women artists graduating from the Royal College of Art’s ceramics course in the early 1970s. Making pots, as well as thinking, writing, and talking about the ambiguities of craft in the art world, has focussed her life. Working from London studios for 45 years, she has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and since 1998 she has been represented by Marsden Woo Gallery, London.
In 2011 her work featured in the exhibition Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970 –1990, at the V&A, where, and in 2016, her retrospective exhibition Content and Form was held. In 2017/2018 Britton was included in the important UK/USA exhibition Things of Beauty Growing, and she wrote the preface to the related book. She published Seeing Things, Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design in 2013.
Britton has also curated exhibitions, including; The Makers Eye at the Crafts Council (1981); British Ceramics for the British Council in former Czechoslovakia (1984). In 2009 she curated Three by One which explored three major public craft collections and Life and Still Life in 2012, combining her new work with collected objects, both for the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham. She has been Chair of the Trustees of the Craft Study Centre since 2014.
Alongside making, writing and curating, Britton worked part time in Ceramics and Glass at the RCA from 1984 to 2018, and relished the interaction with students finding their own path.
In 1993, Britton co-curated The Raw and the Cooked with Martina Margetts, at the Barbican and Modern Art Oxford, which then toured in East Asia and Europe. Exploring the way clay is used as a material for making sculptural works as well as functional objects, the exhibition brought together a range of artists and approaches. In her lecture, Britton will reflect on this exhibition and on being part of an emergence of a radical abstract expressionist style of ceramic work.
This year’s Annual CoCA Lecture will take place at York Art Gallery and ticket holders will have the opportunity to visit CoCA’s new exhibition Gillian Lowndes: At The Edge after the lecture, where drinks will also be on sale.
York Museums Trust is able to run this event with the generous support of the Friends of York Art Gallery and the Craft Potters Association.
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