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The Tree Project: Cathie Pilkington
81 Plays11 months ago
Cathie Pilkington is an artist whose work engages passionately and critically with the canonical history of figurative sculpture. Crossing the borders of traditional, modern and contemporary idioms, her work combines intensively modelled and painted sculptures within immersive installations comprising a diverse array of props, materials and studio furniture. Her site-responsive installations are balanced ambivalently between chaos and precision and have been described as a kind of art historical fly-tipping.
Pilkington studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1986-91) and The Royal College of Art (1995-97).
She was elected a Royal Academician in 2014 and became the first female professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools 2016-2019.
In 2020 she was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy of Art, London.
During her time as Head of Jewellery & Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art, renowned jeweller and educator Dorothy Hogg MBE inspired students in the workshop and beyond. For more information on Dorothy Hogg, the project and participants, visit: www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org/tree-project.
Hosted by Ebba Goring
Edited & Produced by Eda Obermanns
Cover Image by Shannon Tofts
Music: Precious Memories by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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Transcript
Introduction to The Tree Project Podcast Series
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Tree Project, Dorothy Hogg Life and Legacy podcast series. I'm Ebber Goering from Scottish Goldsmiths Trust, and this podcast series has been developed to highlight the impact and legacy of the late Dorothy Hogg MBE and her influential time leading the Jewellery and Silersmithing Department at Edinburgh College of Art. The participants in this project were selected by Dorothy alongside her friend Curator Amanda Gaines.
Participant Selection and Information Source
00:00:32
Speaker
For more information on this project and all those involved, head over to our website, www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org.
Cathy Pilkington's Current Role
00:00:43
Speaker
In this episode, I'm joined by Cathy Pilkington. Thank you for joining me, Cathy. Let's start with an introduction and what it is that you do now. So I'm Cathy Pilkington. I'm a sculptor and I also, at the moment, I'm the keeper of the Royal Academy Schools in London.
Transition from Sculpture to Jewellery
00:01:02
Speaker
Tell me about why you chose to study at ECA, what led you there? I went to ECA, I graduated in 1991 from jewellery in the silversmithing department but when I went up to Edinburgh I went up to do the sculpture course, the sculpture BA, so I didn't apply to jewellery in silversmithing, I knew nothing about jewellery in silversmithing.
00:01:24
Speaker
and I was very clear. I did my foundation in North Cheshire College and it was a really amazing foundation. It was really kind of energised and a really amazing year and I wasn't really clear about what my speciality subject was, what I wanted to concentrate on. I knew I wanted to make and I was an obsessive maker, kind of always had been an obsessive maker of things and I developed that in the foundation course and I was making quite sort of large-scale stuff
00:01:54
Speaker
And I think that the tutors at the time thought that I might go into theatre because of the sort of atmosphere that was in my work. I was quite interested in this, but I looked at a few theatre design courses and I couldn't stand the idea of making scale models and designing things. I just wanted to be very free to kind of experiment.
00:02:11
Speaker
So I ended up looking at sculpture courses and I can remember looking traveling around the country at the time and looking at various sculpture courses and I didn't come from a background where there was any kind of art going or museum visiting you know there wasn't any kind of cultural life in in that sense and so I didn't have any real framework for thinking about what kind of practice I might get involved with.
00:02:34
Speaker
and fine art seemed to be the most kind of open space I could go to. The reason I applied to Edinburgh was it was more kind of personal and psychological. I can remember being in my foundation course Canteen and looking at the map of all the courses that you could apply to and I looked at all the cluster of pins that were in the map and then there were some right at the top of the country and I just thought I want to go as far away as I can.
00:02:58
Speaker
So I did. I arrived in Edinburgh, I don't know, I ended up changing course which is the kind of story
Discovering Energy in Jewellery and Silversmithing
00:03:04
Speaker
really of meeting Doc. So it's the late 80s anyway and arriving in a fine art sculpture school in the late 80s from a kind of provincial sort of upbringing situation, it was a pretty blokey affair.
00:03:18
Speaker
And it was a kind of environment that felt very, I felt it very difficult to locate in. And the kind of attitude and the kind of work that was being made, I mean, it was very traditional when I look back on it now, but at the time I found it quite intimidating. Physically, we were dealing with, you know, things like carving stone or chainsaws or welding. I was interested in it all, but I found it quite difficult to kind of get going.
00:03:46
Speaker
And I think that the discussions that were maybe more sort of art historical or critical I found really difficult as well. I wanted to find my way through making and find a language that I could express myself in or learn how to just even join things together before I sort of started talking
Mentorship and Switching to Jewellery
00:04:03
Speaker
about.
00:04:03
Speaker
what things might mean and at the time of course I wasn't as articulate as this about what was going on but it wasn't things didn't fit together for me and part of that course at that point was that you did a second subject one day a week you could opt to do a second subject and I opted to try Julian Silversmithing really on a whim
00:04:27
Speaker
What do you remember about the jewellery and silversmithing department at that time and your transition from sculpture to jewellery and silversmithing? On one day a week on a Friday I was in the jewellery and silversmithing department and this is where I encountered Dot and I encountered the entity of Dot really because it wasn't just about her physical presence and the way she looked but the whole workshop kind of like fizzed with this sort of focus.
00:04:55
Speaker
and energy. And she was basically whizzing around the corridor full of purpose, doing technical workshops, chatting to people. And the kind of energy in that department felt completely different to what I was encountering in the sculpture school. And this is, I'm not being critical of the sculpture school, which is, was great. It's more about where I was at as a young person then, and how I could kind of find a way into things. It seemed at the time that there was lots of different things. There was
00:05:24
Speaker
dot was the character. And then there was the idea of making things on a smaller scale in one material, you know, in metal, basically, and learning a range of techniques that could be taught, learned and applied quite fluidly. And because there was a kind of repertoire, it wasn't like you could do anything. You can make something out of plastic or air, or it could just be text. It was applied art. And I think at the time, for me, that was really crucial.
00:05:53
Speaker
But I didn't know any of that. I was just doing it one day a week and really enjoying myself on Fridays. And after a period of time, I thought, well, I'm just looking forward to Friday every week and the rest of the weekend miserable. So and this went on for some time. And after a long period of time, sort of trying to work things out with both my tutors in sculpture and starting to talk to Dot, it was agreed that I could transfer course.
00:06:20
Speaker
And I think this wasn't something that happened very often. And it took, I think on Dot's part, she always said she took a risk on me on taking young.
Personalized Growth and Exploration in Silversmithing
00:06:29
Speaker
It was quite clear that I wasn't ever going to make anything functional. That's not what it was about. Once you had made that move, tell me more about your experience in the department and what stands out looking back now. I think the amazing thing about Dot
00:06:47
Speaker
was her focus on the individual. You know, she really got into your head. She was really, really interested in what made you tick and what your interests were and in how to actually join that up in the workshop. So rather than asking you questions about intention or framing your work in a way that connected with other historical work,
00:07:14
Speaker
She would be digging more internally with you. You know, she would always say, go with your gut instinct. So she would talk about the unconscious really, and she would talk about intuition and gut instinct. So she gave you permission to really be yourself. And I think for me, that was so important because I really felt like I didn't fit in. I didn't fit into the jewellery department either.
00:07:38
Speaker
But it was OK, because Dot was very much like, we're going to make this work for you. We're going to make your experience here the shape it needs to be so that you can grow.
Creative Partnership and Opportunities
00:07:48
Speaker
And I think that, yeah, it was amazing what she did for me as an individual, actually. So I didn't go into the jewellery course. Formally, I was doing jewellery and silversmithing, so I was a silversmith. I mean, really, I was making sculpture using silversmithing techniques. And it wasn't straightforward or easy.
00:08:07
Speaker
and I think that she was aware of what she could give me but she was very aware of what she couldn't provide and she worried about that as well because she could see that there were certain elements within that department that weren't challenging enough for me in terms of art history the things that I wanted to get away from I guess as I went on or working with other fine artists so she thought that I felt quite limited within the jury department
00:08:32
Speaker
But I was much more comfortable there than in the sculpture department. What she did do to kind of enable me was, it was a couple of things. One was that she put me together with another student there called Richard Lee, who was also doing silversmithing. And she kind of made us into a team. You know, she could kind of see that we could kind of egg each other on and be good for each other and kind of spar with each other. And we became really, really good friends and we were quite competitive in a really creative way. It was a really good foil for each other.
00:09:01
Speaker
And funnily enough, he ended up going to do sculpture at the Royal College after being in jewelry and silversmithing. So it was quite an interesting trajectory. And of course, when I went to Royal College after Edinburgh, David Watkins, who was running jewelry and silversmithing there, he was trained as a sculptor, you know, so it's not an untrodden path. In fact, Dot would always talk to me about Alexander Calder, for instance, when I was working with The Wire.
00:09:27
Speaker
The other thing that she did was that she made sure that me and Richard had access to life drawing. She really promoted drawing. I think that it was my sketchbooks and my drawing that convinced her that she'd take me on and do something with me. She also invited in artists to work with us. So she brought in fine artists for us to do day workshops with just me and Richard.
00:09:50
Speaker
So she took us out of the workshop situation and let us do these other more expansive drawing workshops or developing ideas in a different way and then coming back to the workshop, feeding that into metal or whatever.
Personalized Teaching Style of Dorothy Hogg
00:10:02
Speaker
So it was pretty bespoke actually what she laid on. Interesting how you describe it as bespoke. That focus on the individual is something that has been mentioned in these interviews and the autonomy that Dorothy had to be able to do that. Can you tell me more about that?
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and she would ask you, you know, she was genuinely interested in your life, so she wouldn't just talk about your work, she would ask you questions about your life, what you thought about things, she would really try and get to know you, you know, and I can remember staying in the workshops late when she was doing assessments for like the second years and I was in third year and we were allowed to stay late and you could hear her with Bill going through each student and they weren't just talking about the practice, you know, there they were, you know, saying
00:10:50
Speaker
what kind of a character this person was. And when they spent time with this person and they, you know, they were doing maybe a casting workshop, this happened. And perhaps if we encouraged them to do this more, it could really take off in this direction. You know, really kind of invested interest in the individual growth, yeah. I feel like I kind of caught that department at a time, you know, when there was time to do that, there was just enough. I mean, she was always run off her feet as well, but it felt like there was time for that kind of conversation
00:11:20
Speaker
I remember seeing your degree show collection but could you tell our listeners about the inspiration and themes in your final year work?
Inspiration from Travels and Narratives
00:11:30
Speaker
By the time I got to my third year I'd been off to India between my second and third year and I'd come back and of course I'd seen loads of really amazing things made out of metal and junk and all kinds of stuff you know and I think that really fed into.
00:11:43
Speaker
what I then went on to do that year. I was very interested in historical tales, fairy tales, the archetypal kind of religious visual narratives that history is full of. I came back wanting to revisit the story of Noah's Ark.
00:12:02
Speaker
I'd made this sort of lot of boat shape in the second year. I thought I was going to make this huge boat and put tiny animals in it somehow. And I'd made a sketchbook full of drawings of this and Dorothy looked through the sketchbook and listened to me about my plans. And then she looked at me very hard. She gave me this sort of Paddington Bear stare. She looked right at me and she said, Kathy, I'm a jeweller. I would make the animals first.
00:12:28
Speaker
and she paused and this was a, you know, she delivered it with great heft. And I just stopped and thought, do you know what, I think she's right, you know, because I wasn't quite sure how big to start making that. So I started to make animals that were based on some of the drawings that I'd done of
00:12:46
Speaker
water buffalo. I began to think about how I could use metal really as a drawing tool. The animals that I started to create they were sort of made from a combination of all of the techniques that I'd learned. So soft and eeled, I'm binding wire that was kind of used
00:13:02
Speaker
functionally to hold together metal for brazing and soldering became my sort of staple medium. It was almost like charcoal to me, this wire. And so the structures, the kind of anatomies or the armature of the animals were brazed, forged copper, and then they were clad and assembled from rolled, raised
00:13:23
Speaker
rapusae and etched fabric forms that I kind of stitched together really. So they were like three-dimensional drawings, so it was kind of exploring the graphic capabilities of metal from them. So I think that that way of putting together form from parts, you know, that's a kind of fundamental aspect of jewellery making, isn't it, that there's a repeated unit or form.
00:13:49
Speaker
And I think that I was tangentially using those kinds of ideas, you know, and I was surrounded by all the possibilities of those processes. And then I was applying them to something in a much more open sculptural way. And I think importantly, as well, those forms were translucent, so you could walk around and they weren't closed mass. They were like a three dimensional drawing and collage, which that that sort of method of thinking and assembly is still something that I apply to my work now in a very different context.
Studio Experience and Teaching Challenges
00:14:20
Speaker
And after the degrees show, Kathy, what did you do next? After I graduated, I carried on making a metal and I had a studio at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. It had just been set up actually by a few of the sculpture graduates. So I got a studio there and actually Susan Cross, who was my tutor part-time, who was absolutely brilliant, she had a studio there. When I was lucky enough to have a part-time teaching job,
00:14:46
Speaker
at ECA teaching drawing, which again is a, you know, it's multidisciplinary isn't it drawing. And I was working there probably for about four or five years. And I was making very strange kind of hybrid objects that were kind of part jewellery, part sculpture. And having, you know, I was teaching also at Leeds School of Art and running workshops. I think, you know, at first that was fine, but I started to feel more and more kind of frustrated about
00:15:14
Speaker
where I fit in and what I was actually doing. I had shown some work at the Business Design Centre and David Watkins from Royal College had written me a postcard and said, why don't you come and have a chat with me? And it took me about four years to pluck up the courage to go and have a chat with him. So I did, I went to have a chat with him and he said, you should come and do an MA by project.
00:15:38
Speaker
which was basically, again, carving out a little area in Julian Silversmithing that wasn't the main course, but was very much about metalsmithing techniques. And the MA by Project was called something about exploring the graphic capabilities of metal.
00:15:55
Speaker
an experiment with electroforming. So he was really keen because he was a sculptor, of course. So you could see that he was interested in that sort of area between the two disciplines and what could be done with it. And he'd got electroforming equipment and it seemed like a really good, good step forward. And it felt like going back to school was a really good idea. So I think that was in sort of mid 90s. How did your work develop during your time at the RCA?
00:16:24
Speaker
It's interesting because I think all of this, it sounds in a sense, confused, like I didn't know where I was. And that's true. What I found is that that confusion or that questioning about the content of the work, the context of the work, who the audience is, who I'm addressing and this hopping in and out of high and low art, these different kind of cultural registers.
00:16:50
Speaker
is rather than it being a problem, it's become the kind of content or the centre of my practice. I suppose for a while I was stranded between art and craft. I started to find that craft was too limited in its sort of discussion.
00:17:06
Speaker
about material processes and the fine art world seemed to be too caught up in concept theory and politics.
Negotiating Identity in Art and Craft
00:17:13
Speaker
And I sort of wanted to find somewhere else, some other world, through doing an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, really negotiating a position that engaged with the contradictions of high and low cultural positions and with craft and art and with matter and history.
00:17:32
Speaker
So all of these conflicting elements became the content itself in my practice. So there was a period of time at the end of my time at the RCA where I was using a lot of found objects and exploring ideas of installing them.
00:17:48
Speaker
quite theatrically, and I've always been really interested in ornaments and toys. I guess my first sculptural interests were through ornaments, my grandma's ornaments. I always used to believe you could bring them to life, you know, that classic kind of uncanny line of thoughts about inanimate and inanimate life. And there came a point towards the end of my MA where I realised that to have the kind of control that I needed over the form, to be able to control the emotional kind of response,
00:18:15
Speaker
to the objects I was using, I needed to be able to make them myself, not just use found objects. And I actually needed to teach myself how to model traditionally, naturalistically in clay, which is something that was definitely not taught. In fact, it was positively found upon.
00:18:33
Speaker
And so instead of doing it at college, I did it secretly at home. So I had kind of provisional exploratory work going on in the studio that we could hold crits around and talk about art. And then I had secret work going on at home, which is what I really wanted to make. And I tried to teach myself by making a hyper-realistic Jack Russell in my loft.
00:18:53
Speaker
And it was very hard. I think there's a sort of interesting thing in my work where I'm quite limited in my ability to grasp three-dimensional form, which is why I make sculpture. You know, I can't do it on paper. I have to actually turn it around and to try and work out this multi-dimensional kind of
00:19:12
Speaker
anatomical challenge I mean it was unbelievable to try and do that for the first time on your own just with I just had photographs I didn't even have anatomy books at that point I didn't think I needed to get into that side of things until I started and then I realized you know that without structure you're really staffed you could be there for like two years and it's still not going to work so I worked away at this and I finally
00:19:34
Speaker
brought it into the RCA and there was all kinds of murmurings and like, oh my God, you know, why have you done this? I learnt, I made a mould and from the mould I was then able to do loads of experimental things with it. So it started off as this naturalistic, sentimental idea really, or form. And then it became something that you could do, be really dispassionate with, you could chop it up, you could cover it in carpet, you could do all kinds of things with it.
00:20:02
Speaker
that sort of established a kind of mode of making that brought in something very traditional and historical and with something where that was actually questioned.
Exploring Childhood Narratives and Connections
00:20:13
Speaker
And so these figures then developed from that. So I moved from the animal forms into these child figures that were still very object-like and kind of doll-like and their scales were quite challenging.
00:20:28
Speaker
So I played around with the hyper-realistic dogs. I had to paint them in oil paint as well. I was very influenced by Greyfriars Bobby, actually. I loved the idea of Greyfriars Bobby being, you know, I'll meet you at the dog, being a kind of, again, for everybody. That was at that period of time I made this hyper-realistic. Jack Russell painted it and it went into it. It was a public commission, a millennium commission for art science development in Bristol called At Bristol.
00:20:55
Speaker
when that was a really weird thing to call yourself because it was so new. The dog was called Jasmine, and instead of being on a plinth like Greyfriars Bobby, she was cast in bronze but she was on the ground and her lead trail behind her and the armature was sunk into concrete foundations and there was CCTV on her.
00:21:15
Speaker
But the area that she was put into was, it was the area where it used to be a skateboarding path. I think a lot of the youth culture in Bristol were a bit unhappy that this had been taken over and kind of gentrified into this art science space. There was a certain amount of vandalism that took place. One of the things that happened was they came along with an angle grinder and cut off my Jack Russell at the ankles and left the paws
00:21:39
Speaker
on the pavement and nicked the dog. It was interesting because it almost like became art as idea because then a narrative evolved. The local press got hold of it and it became a story, you know, have you seen our dog? Bristol gone to the dogs. And there was photographs of the hyper-realistic Jack Russell taken round houses. Police were knocking on doors saying, have you seen this dog? And eventually it was found on the hard shoulder of the motorway, disposed of the evidence because everyone was up in arms about their dog being taken.
00:22:09
Speaker
it was reinstalled two other times and each time it came to grief. It is actually still there but it's inside the building now but there are two other dogs there as well that I made so the remnants of it are there and funnily enough because they're painted they haven't been restored they do look like old tin toys now. Could you share something about the imagery you were using in your earlier work? It's quite dark isn't it?
00:22:35
Speaker
One of the things that you can see throughout my work is the fact that I actually thematized making. So if you look at some of the earlier works that are very much, they're like narrative tableaus. So I was looking again at social history objects, taxidermy tableaus, things that were very approachable and that they're a kind of mode that was sort of vivid and direct and engaged the viewer very directly. And they were often quite satirical, these works. So I was making fun of
00:23:04
Speaker
of craft as well as loving it. They were very ambivalent, these kind of narratives. So, for example, one of them is called Potter Pig. It's a sculpture that's on the constructs of its making, so it's actually assembled on a workshop table and there's a very busy manic pig, cartoon pig, making millions of pots and they're piling up all around him. He's sort of like an abject figure, but it's almost like
00:23:34
Speaker
is almost redeemed by his kind of floppy pots. You know, if he does, if he makes enough, if he's obsessed enough, he might hit on a winner. I did a whole show at Moltbrough on Art based on reworking of these fairy tales.
00:23:50
Speaker
I think importantly these works were made when my daughter was kind of four or five and I was revisiting the Ladybird books that my mum read to me. So these really incredible vivid illustrations by Robert Lumley and Vera Southgate that I absolutely adored when you know there's so much to do with
00:24:10
Speaker
the material and they're so vivid. So I started actually building them and revisiting the narratives. One of my favourites was called The Wolf and the Seven Kids and I remade the scene. The wolf has swallowed all the children whole and the mother finds the wolf sleeping, cuts them open. All of the kids pop out of the stomach and she and the one remaining kid that hid in the clock case, they find these boulders
00:24:38
Speaker
and they put six boulders back into the wolf's stomach and stitch him up again all while he's asleep. So I revisit this scene because I looked and looked and looked at it for so long as a child and then my daughter was like equally fascinated in it and I was making this show at that time and the show was called Peaceable Kingdom.
Exploring Contexts and Viewer Perception
00:24:56
Speaker
it's an exact transcription of the mother stitching from that illustration but instead of the wolf she's got a large cloth enormous cloth lamb which is kind of like could be her baby that she's stitching back together
00:25:14
Speaker
is quite ambivalent, whether it's she's fixing it or it's dead. And these kind of like open narratives and kind of half made things are really central to the work of that period. You often install work in different places, not just in galleries. Could you say something about how you started to do that? I was making it the kind of objects that sort of sit between something like a charity shop dummy, a doll,
00:25:43
Speaker
and a real child and they're quite sort of challenging scales as well so they're just a bit too small to be lifelike so they're very unsettling and I experimented a lot with different content. He stood outside the Economist Plaza in St James and was kicked in the head by someone at 3am
00:26:04
Speaker
And then he was in an installation called Emporium in a private gallery in a house that I turned into a kind of immersive environment. And then he went into the Museum of Childhood and he was curated into clothes. It's called Clothing Through the Ages. So it actually looked like a kind of shop dummy again. So it was really interesting exploring how all those things kind of merge and confuse
00:26:31
Speaker
in a really interesting way, you know, how you can control meaning through context. When I was working in that very naturalistic, figurative manner, I like to work with things that are sort of a bit worn out, things that are very ordinary and try and find something more to say about them. That period, it was really exciting and important to be able to take a group of those objects where I had been making reference to toys,
00:26:56
Speaker
making reference to dolls, as well as mixing in references to classical sculpture and stories, all these different kind of sources, really, to be able to take those objects and actually put them into the cases in the museum itself and to see them as museum objects and as historical objects did something very particular. And it was a really important turning point for me to think about not just mixing up references in the work itself,
00:27:26
Speaker
but actually looking at the context and placing the work and also the audience and the use of the architecture of all that particular context.
Role as Keeper at the Royal Academy of Arts
00:27:35
Speaker
So that's something that I then went on to explore in more depth. You've taken us on this journey of how your work has developed since your time at Edinburgh College of Art. Can you tell us now a little bit about your current role as keeper at the Royal Academy?
00:27:52
Speaker
So currently I hold the role of keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts, which sounds very grand. And in many ways it is because it's a great historic institution. It's a huge privilege to be the keeper at the moment. I became an RA in 2014. So the Royal Academy was established in 1768, which is, we always think of it as a very old historic institution. And then I think about the goldsmiths and that was established in the 1300s, wasn't it? So we're very.
00:28:21
Speaker
very contemporary in comparison, but it has really, really changed and transformed and currently it has the most vibrant contemporary art school in the country, I would argue, and it's an independent art school. So the keeper role is to oversee the RA schools and the RA schools is really the centre of the Ward Academy because the Ward Academy was established to open a school to professionalise the teaching of artists.
00:28:48
Speaker
and it was opened as an independent organisation which would fund its own school by holding the summer exhibition which still stands now, that whole structure of a summer exhibition which brings in huge amounts of revenue every year is how the Royal Academy Schools is funded.
00:29:06
Speaker
So we're very proudly independent and really the first artist run in space. And although for many years we've gone through periods of being irrelevant and famously Henry Moore used to cross over the other side of the road as he passed the Ward Academy in case he catch something awful.
00:29:22
Speaker
It's a really exciting time to be part of the Academy now. You know, our new members are, we've got a very diverse membership and the schools is a really exciting place to be. It's very small, we only have a maximum of 50 students at once. It's a three-year fine art programme and it's fee-free so there are no tuition fees charged which is pretty incredible right
RA Schools' Experimental Environment
00:29:45
Speaker
now.
00:29:45
Speaker
particularly in this this sort of current climate and you can imagine how contested the places are to to get a place and the ethos of the schools is it's studio based and workshop based so we have the most incredible workshop facilities run by brilliant expert artists everyone who works at the schools has their own practice
00:30:07
Speaker
and works part time. We have a very intensive three-year program. When we select students, we're selecting not just diversity in terms of background and ethnicity, but also practice and approach. It's almost like a social experiment, you know, seeing how these diverse elements and vibrant materials co-exist and spark off each other. And it's really incredible seeing the transformation that happens over that three years.
00:30:36
Speaker
So the thing that we really value is time, time to experiment, to really dig deep into the practice. And, you know, it's very critically challenging, but because we have this studio and workshop based ethos as well.
00:30:52
Speaker
all of the thinking and talking and dialectical discussion goes on through making so it really is a unique environment. It's completely postgraduate so we're looking for applicants that are already on a line of inquiry and that really want to challenge that or they might be returning to it after a break and there's no upper age limit and our kind of average age is about 28. I think some of the ways that Doc
00:31:19
Speaker
interacted with her students and looked to bring in the nutrients that they needed. I think the way that she dealt with myself and my co-colleague student Richard Lee, we were the two silversmiths in our year group, the way that Dot was very aware of what
00:31:37
Speaker
department might not be able to give us, she would bring that in in addition and that's very much the way the RA schools is run because it's small and we have kind of really intimate knowledge of each student. We bring in, you know, the students can request artists, they can request anyone in the world that they want to speak to and we'll try and get hold of them for them.
00:31:57
Speaker
It's a really nurturing environment as well as being a very critical environment. It's very constructive, you know, it seeks out things that each individual might need. We like to think as well that each student comes and they bring something to the school and they change the school in some way.
Historical Refurbishment of RA
00:32:14
Speaker
At the moment, we're in the middle of a historical refurb. So the studios that we've been working in for like hundreds of years have patched together. We talk about them as being covered in barnacle. The great thing about the Royal Academy is that next generation of artists are working underneath.
00:32:29
Speaker
the galleries you know where the viewing public are coming to see the shows underneath in this like subterranean world of the RA schools and the way that that has been patched and cobbled together is very much because of a student coming and saying oh I want to
00:32:45
Speaker
make work like this, you know, or we now need a digital printing suite. So we'll build one in a cupboard. We now need a dark room. We'll build one over here. We'll build a mezzanine. We'll do this. We'll build a tent. We had a tent at the back that was erected 35 years ago to give us extra workshop space, which was then completely flooded. And over the last 15 years, we've been putting together this plan and fundraising. And eventually this year, the refurbished schools are going to be opened by
00:33:13
Speaker
this time next year so it's an incredibly exciting time to be the keeper and to see to see that as such a historical moment.
Integrating Historical and Contemporary Practices
00:33:21
Speaker
The workshop facilities we have are really fantastic you know we've got analog and digital you know we're really looking at traditional modern and contemporary ways of working so we've got sculpture workshop metalwork woodwork we've got ceramics we've got digital embroidery we've got robotics we've got 3D printing
00:33:42
Speaker
We've got a new time-based media studio being built and a performance studio. So it's completely multidisciplinary. The keeper's role is meant to be a part-time job. So there is a contract, you know, it's modernised a lot. I mean, the keeper used to live in the RA. They were literally the artist in residence and they used to raise their families there. You know, of course they were men.
00:34:04
Speaker
they were painters as well, you know, there were no sculptors. And now it's turned into, you know, a much more modern role and it is two to three days a week, so in that way it's like having a contractual teaching post, you know, where you balance your home studio and your teaching. It takes away, it takes a big chunk out of studio time in one respect, but
00:34:26
Speaker
I think what I gained from spending time with the students and what I've come to understand about the institution, it sort of brings so much with it. So it's a huge privilege and I have a studio there as well. The Keeper's Studio is the last remaining part of what was The Keeper's House.
00:34:43
Speaker
is a beautiful studio and very not well equipped to be a sculptor and it's very much a painted studio but I use it in all kinds of different ways. I use it to set up my installations, it's a clean space really. I use it for meeting students sometimes go and have counseling there, it's a really nice space to kind of get away from the
00:35:02
Speaker
hubbub of the academy. I've just been re-elected for my second term so it goes to the public vote, the RAs vote you in or not. I'm in the fourth year of this role. I was the first female professor of sculpture which I did for four years before becoming keeper. And how does your role as keeper work with your identity as an artist? You know I'm really interested in how a contemporary artist can work with
00:35:27
Speaker
the problematic inheritance of historical canons that no longer fit with the way we live now. And I'm passionate about traditional methods of studio production and expression, but we can't be traditional anymore. That requires a shared and uncontested history, but we can't rid ourselves of our problematic inheritance. But we can attempt to integrate parts or fragments, which is what I've been talking about, this method of assembly. And that works with ideas as well.
00:35:57
Speaker
you know, kind of rehabilitating or revivifying objects and images to make them meaningful to us now. So that's why I sort of see a connection between my role as keeper and my role as an artist because I'm a sculptor and an assembler and I assemble ideas as well as objects. And I often work with collections or make contemporary interventions into historical settings. So in this way, my current role
00:36:24
Speaker
of keeper fits well with the content of my work and the way I think. The last show I did sort of explores these ideas is that I'm often drawn to engage with motifs that seem exhausted or overburdened by history to test out what meanings and relevance they can have today. I made a show called Weird Horses. You know, the image of the horse is loaded. It's almost like a cliche.
00:36:51
Speaker
It's a motif that's deep in the canon of like a relic of past ideas and myths and empires and things like that. And it's tied so closely with the structures of civilization. It's almost invisible, even though you'll see horses everywhere on plinths with men riding them. And so I always start with something quite personal and direct. So I didn't start with the horse thinking about it as a statue.
00:37:20
Speaker
I started about thinking about something much more vulnerable, actually. I think very hard about how I can kind of integrate the rawness of emotion with the kind of harshness of maybe contemporary realities of what art has become, you know. So sculpture used to be confident and it used to know what it was for, where it was meant to live in the world, but now things aren't so clear.
00:37:47
Speaker
Now anything could be described as sculpture, a pile of blankets, a urinal. So it has to work very hard to be in the world to be separate from other things. And my weird horses, they're fabricated in mixed materials, using a combination of studio methods and this includes fabric, plaster, straw and bronze. And they're stitched together, they're poured, they're cast and assembled. And instead of their bodies being heroic and streamlined, my horses are fragmented.
00:38:18
Speaker
they're absurd, they're in bits. It's unclear if they're still being made or if they're falling apart. If contemporary art is about questioning its very existence, its very edges, everything about it, traditional art comes from a shared and uncontested history, perhaps a particular community, a context that's shared and agreed upon. We don't live like that anymore, do we?
00:38:45
Speaker
One of the things that Dot really liked to talk about with me was this idea that I, these are her words, that I straddled departments. You know, she was very conscious that I wasn't joining the department because I wanted to make functional objects or even applied objects. You know, she kind of really got that I was after a language of expression, which came out of really my passion and interest in drawing and my obsession with sketchbooks.
00:39:14
Speaker
The whole department was, you know, the kind of energy in there was one of great discipline, but of great possibility. Thank you, Cathy. Such a pleasure speaking with you. Listeners, there's more information about Cathy, relevant links and images on the project page on our website.