Items where Year is 2011

When serving as an orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital, Bristol during the First World War, the young Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, a 20-year old aesthete and scion of a noted Bristol theatre family. A close friendship ensued, as the 31 letters in this collection attest. Far more sophisticated and better educated, Chute introduced the older man (Spencer was 24 when they met) to classical literature and great music and, perhaps most crucially, to the Confessions of St Augustine. Chute’s influence on Spencer s intellectual development cannot be exaggerated. Spencer’s often illustrated letters include some written while awaiting posting overseas, others from the battlefields of Macedonia give glimpses of his tribulations in a theatre of war, along with extraordinarily well-wrought reminiscences of Cookham, colourfully populated with places and characters. A few, concluding, letters were written from Fernlea back in his home village, and Hampstead in the 1920s.

Desmond Chute (1895-1962) was for a while at the Slade School of Art. He became an assistant to Eric Gill, and involved in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. He was admitted as a Catholic priest in 1927, moving to Italy where he was a friend of Ezra Pound. He had some success as a published writer and playwright, including a radio play broadcast by the BBC in 1955. All the letters are transcribed for the modern reader; some are also reproduced facsimile with Spencer s illustrations. A series of introductory essays, Stanley Spencer at war and peace , by Paul Gough give the background to the correspondence, discuss its importance to Spencer, and provide previously unpublished information about the Chute family. Archive photographs provide a visual context

This article examines how animated films re-present and re-interpret real world occurrences, people and places, focusing on an area that has been overlooked to date: the process of performance and how this manifests itself in animated documentary films. Not simply a notion of ‘performance’ as we might understand it in an ‘acting’ sense (someone playing a role in a re-enactment), but that of the animator performing specific actions in order to interpret the factual material. The central questions addressed are: how does an understanding of ‘performance’ and the related term ‘performativity’ help us to frame animated/nonfictional acting? What ontological questions are raised by thinking about notions of acting in animation (and the performance instantiated in the very action of animating)? How do viewers relate to, interpret or ‘believe in’ animated films that are asserting real/factually-based stories? The article uses a recent film, the ten mark, as a case study to explore possible answers to these questions.

Hard Times
This was a solo exhibition of 20 photographs shown at St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ Gallery, London which showcases the work of contemporary artists. The exhibition, which was also shown in Bournemouth, Birmingham, Inverness and Wick, reached a wide audience and received numerous awards including the Association of Professional Photographers’ Gold Award.

Research Imperatives
Hard Times shed light on the hidden lives of Britain’s homeless through a collection of photographs of Big Issue vendors, about whom little is known.
The underpinning research was essentially sociological. Wenham-Clarke researched at the Big Issue headquarters at Waterloo identifying individuals and patterns of experience, identifying a set of issues and responding to them in ways that were intended to move the ground of public debate. It was also practice-led research involving testing out composition, medium and mode of delivery. A further aspect of the research touched on methodologies of oral history using selected quotations from interviewees to accompany the images. Building on previous work by Shelter and other organisations (Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home, 1966 and The Crisis Commission, Somerset House, March-April 2012) it also sought to develop the use of art as a tool against homelessness.
Wenham-Clarke’s research took him on a journey to locations mainly hidden from public view. He researched where people slept rough or in temporary accommodation within and without cities. The research involved not only identifying appropriate locations and individuals but also importantly working to win the confidence of the subjects he intended to photograph and gaining their consent.
The research highlighted the fact that unemployment and rough sleeping involves people of all ages, both male and female; it challenged common perceptions around the causes and circumstances of homelessness, and provided a fascinating insight into individual’s personal history, their relationships, the challenges they face and their hopes for the future.