Second Year Fine Art Critical Practice Students’ Day Residency at the Booth Museum of Natural History Brighton 7 November 2018
As part of Level 5’s year of ‘post-studio’ study they spend two days working with museum and archive collections. The first of these is a visit to the Booth Museum of Natural History in Brighton. The day begins with a welcome talk by John Cooper, Emeritus Keeper of the Museum who introduces the students to the collection of natural history including the taxidermy collection of British Birds which formed the original legacy of Edward Booth who started the museum in his own house on Dyke Road during the second half of the 19thCentury. The students are then taken on tours of the natural history collection which is of international significance and which houses rocks, fossils, thousands of insects as well as other creatures and botanical specimens.
The students are invited to work with whatever fascinates them the most and to come up with an idea during the rest of the day for a site-specific artwork for the museum. They might work individually or in pairs or small groups. They can take photographs, make sketches, take notes, examine the museum in more detail, use performance or whatever medium comes to mind to process their ideas. At the end of the day they present their ideas to the rest of the group, to their L5 Tutor, Susan Diab and to the Keeper John Cooper who can give them specific feedback about the suitability of their proposals for a museum context.
The Fine Art Critical Practice course has been hosted by the staff of the Booth Museum in this way for seven years now and considers itself very fortunate to have such good connections to such a fascinating and inspiring museum. In its turn the museum benefits from these visits as new members of its audience are created. In 2017 a number of University of Brighton lecturers from across several disciplines were invited to research and create new presentations for an evening event at the Booth Museum on 26thNovember of that year. Susan Diab was one of those participating and she performed, in an atmospherically lit aisle of the museum an ‘animated reading’ of a script entitled ‘I Penguin’ written as a result of several days spent ‘listening’ to a Little Blue penguin from the collection.
The second day residency will be with the Design Archive, which is housed at Grand Parade. Beginning with presentations by Archivist Sue Breakell and Digital Archivist Barbara Taylor students are introduced to ideas and theories relating to archiving in general and show examples of how artists work with archives to produce their own work. In the afternoon students work in small groups to ‘curate’ a display of images from the archive, work which is discussed in a critique session at the end of the day.
Both of these day residencies form an important part of the teaching and learning that is preparation for the students’ Fine Art Placements which happen in Semester Two of Level 5.
Working in real contexts with collections, artefacts and images helps to foster an appreciation of the intellectual and practical aspects of collecting and archiving as well as expanding students’ understanding of sites and contexts for the production and display of art.
