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March is Women's History Month
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This year, International Women's Day on 8 March has gone virtual. The theme: #Choosetochallenge. Moreover, the United Nation's theme resonates, "Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 World". We join the efforts by show-casing and celebrating the achievements of women in the arts.
In this Newsletter you will find:
- Artist's Spotlight: Curator Nina Pearlman tells us why we need to know Susan Collins
- Events for IWD: London Edit
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Watch for our next Newsletter that will be out shortly. We have an exciting programme of events for Women's History Month.
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Our Continuing Initiative: Artist Spotlight
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| This month we continue our program - " Artist Spotlight", in which we invite curators from different segments of the art world to tell us about one female artist who deserves greater recognition - drawn from among mid-career and emerging talent. We hope to reflect the diversity of women working in the UK, and the range of media and visions they offer. |
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Curator Nina Pearlman discusses the work of Susan Collins
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Nina Pearlman, Head of UCL Art Collections at University College London, is a contemporary art curator, writer and lecturer, and museum professional. She gained her PhD from the London Consortium, University of London. She is currently steering a cross-section interdisciplinary research initiative on gender equality in the arts.
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Pearlman is a nominator for the Prix Pictet global prize in photography and sustainability and board member of Craftspace. Recent collaborative curatorial projects include Prize & Prejudice (2018), Disrupters and Innovators: Journeys of gender equality at UCL (2018), and Edward Allington: In pursuit of sculpture (2017).
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Who is Susan Collins?
In this interview, Dr. Pearlman highlights the work of pioneering artist Susan Collins. Collins (b.1964, London) is recognized as one of the UK’s leaders in the field of artists working with computers and electronic media since the 1980’s. Collins studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (as a Fulbright scholar) and holds a PhD from the University of Reading. She founded the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) in 1995 and is currently Professor of Fine Art and Head of Research at the Slade where she also served as the School's director between 2010-2018.
Some of her notable awards include Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) Art for Architecture award for her collaboration with architect Sarah Wigglesworth on a Classroom of the Future; a BAFTA nomination for her Tate online commission, Tate in Space, and a Society for Photographic Education (USA) award for excellence for Fenlandia and Glenlandia. Her work has been shown widely in the UK and internationally.
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Susan Collins, Glenlandia,
1 September 2005
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What can you tell us about Susan Collins?
Collins works across public, gallery and online spaces employing transmission, networking and time as primary materials. Iconic works include Collins' light installations such as Underglow (2005) in London and Brighter Later (2013) in Oxford that was driven by live weather data. Recent transmission works that showcase her signature practice include LAND (2017) a live transmission from Jerusalem looking across the West Bank towards the Jordanian mountains, and a simultaneous live transmission between Sheffield, UK and Boston, US in Five Hours Later (2019-20) commissioned for MWX (Boston) by Site Gallery Sheffield in collaboration with ICA Boston.
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She sounds like she has had broad recognition. Why choose her work?
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A major retrospective of Collins’ work remains overdue in the UK, and her contribution may still be unknown to many. This is often the case for artists whose practice is interdisciplinary and combines research and site-specific installation. Since the outbreak of Coronavirus artists have been separated from their studios and their audiences and we all have had to revaluate our relationships to local and remote. We have become absorbed in virtual landscapes and immersed in conversations about rates of transmission, and terms of technological and biological natures. In this context, it felt appropriate to me to use the UKNMWA Artist Spotlight to highlight the essential work by Susan Collins. It directly engages with our present lived experience and the larger forces affecting us.
Furthermore, in my role at UCL, I have the pleasure and privilege of working with Susan to interrogate the history of the Slade School of Fine Art as part of the celebration of its 2021 150th anniversary. Collins’ work and significant contribution to education draw on the legacy of pioneering interdisciplinary and collaborative practice at the Slade and its role in the education and career advancement of women artists since the late 19thcentury.
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Light installation Underglow (2005), an iconic work that illuminated street drains in the City of London.
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You mentioned the pandemic. Does her work bear on this?
Three of the largest forces on the planet – technology, globalisation and climate change, are all accelerating at once. To these we now add the virulent force of a pandemic. Collins’ work engages with all of these forces. Technological advancements are now at our fingertips and in the midst of a global pandemic that has confined us to our homes, we have become ever more reliant on them. A wide range of personal devices have become our life companions and our expectations and understanding of transmission technologies have accelerated too. Collins' work, relying on technology, speaks to this new dependence.
Are certain works pivotal to understanding her concerns?
Collins’ early works from the 1990s such as In Conversation relied on emerging technology, which she repurposed and customised. This series of interactive street projections intended to create intimate encounters in public space and to gently disrupt people’s expectations of ordinary everyday situations. Passers-by unintentionally became implicated in the works’ choreography. Audiences played a central role in Collins’ work from this period and this impacts how the work is received over time. Today these projects can only be exhibited as documentation. Even if the work could be reinstalled, we, the audience, are forever changed by technology and we cannot forget what we know.
As technology sped up, and audiences have become technologically savvy, Collins decided to slow down. She began to explore what would happen if she tried to make a live transmission with the smallest amount of data. In her new work Current (2020-21), the artist uses a high-end specialist underwater camera on a boat moored on the Peloponnese peninsula in Southern Greece. The boat serves as an extension to Collins’ studio. A camera situated in the captain’s cabin captures the seascape for the year starting September 2020, constructing images pixel-by-pixel. Each image holds within it a single tidal cycle of approximately twelve hours. Images are being transmitted live back to the artist’s home in London, where she produces single images, shared on social media throughout the lifespan of the project.
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Current, 22 January 2021 at 19:01pm
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This new project builds on earlier works in the UK such as Fenlandia and its companion Glenlandia (2004-5) (see image above) that explored the relationship between landscape, time and technology. Collins’ interest in the history of landscape painting is apparent in her choice of images, and is a continuing thread throughout her practice. Her Seascape project (2009) engaged with the ever-changing nature of the English coastline, that has attracted painters for generations.
Her work sounds quite complex. Is it accessible outside the institutional setting?
Collins looks for images that function as standalone works that reveal something that the naked eye or a traditional photograph cannot capture. These selections become limited editions of small prints alongside a smaller selection of large format prints. Sometimes the transmissions are accessible online and images are frequently shared on social media as a work evolves.
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For Women's History Month: UK Edition
- The WOW Foundation festival is being live streamed on Zoom daily throughout March. The events will look at a range of topics - from gender equality in the tech industry to childcare, and there is even songwriting , Click here for events. WOW
- Now that you have been WOWed, try the WOM Collective. WOM is a grassroots collective of London based female artists that creates space for women to exhibit and sell art. For IWD, the collective presents an Urban Art Gallery under the theme -INSPIRED. You can shop on-line or see the exhibition at Brixton Village Courtyard through 12 April.
- On 8 March, Women at Indeed presents the IWD Flagship event. The virtual event will focus on this year's theme - #choosetochallenge. Panel discussions will cover:
- The impact of covid and women in the workplace
- Breaking the glass ceiling
- Economic gender gap
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https://www.ukfriendsofnmwa.org for information about our mission, membership, exhibition listings and events. You can also find out about our privacy policy, and how we use your data.
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