Vault: 7th Annual UCL Art Museum/Slade Collaboration

About

This exhibition and series of public events is the 7th annual invitation to students at the Slade School of Art to delve into UCL’s art collections and to create new works in response. For the first time this year, it is based on a longer residency format. This allowed for more intensive research, with artists discovering many hidden treasures, to produce individual, contemporary works in a range of media, including installation, performance and painting. Working with the medium of performance, Naomi Fitzsimmons revisits BLAST, a literary magazine produced to promote Vorticism, a modernist art movement headed by Wyndham Lewis. Kara Chin has produced paintings with kinetic elements calling attention to the unseen, as embodied by the very nature of the museum’s stored collection. David Blackmore’s research into Countess Markievicz, a former Slade student who was an Irish militant revolutionary, politician and suffragette, also engages with the unseen by making her conspicuous absence at UCL visible via his sculptural intervention and bespoke archive that will inhabit UCL Art Museum, UCL’s main library and the Slade’s Material Museum. So many fascinating discoveries were made during the residency that the exhibition includes a special display box dedicated to rarely seen material From the Vault. It will feature a bi-weekly rotation of displays selected by guest curators. We encourage you to return to the exhibition to participate in this changing discovery of what may be found in a locked vault when you go looking.