Best Paul Mellon Centre For Studies In British Art Podcasts (2024)

1
S2 Ep6: Sculpting Lives: Making Sculpture Public 1:02:53

2+ y ago1:02:53

1:02:53

Over the last year public sculpture has become a hugely controversial issue. No longer passive objects that we simply walk past on our streets, public sculptures are part of a vigorous debate about contemporary society – who is commemorated and represented, and why. In this episode we delve further into this subject, interviewing the people associa…

1
S2 Ep5: Sculpting Lives: Cathie Pilkington 34:30

2+ y ago34:30

34:30

'The thing about my work is that there is a tension between a passionate love and engagement with the traditions of the past and a complete impatience with their irrelevance and it’s trying to hold those things in tension and trying to engage people in the complexities of that.' Cathie Pilkington, R.A. Cathie Pilkington creates surreal, uncanny and…

1
S2 Ep4: Sculpting Lives: Alison Wilding 31:17

2+ y ago31:17

31:17

Alison Wilding emerged into the art world in the 1980s making powerful sculptural statements out of a myriad of materials. Taking sculpture out of the museum and off the plinth, Wilding’s work is some of the most enigmatic and beguiling sculpture being produced, and in a candid interview in her studio we ask her about influences, materials and her …

1
S2 Ep3: Sculpting Lives: Gertrude Hermes 38:27

2+ y ago38:27

38:27

'She did cause a bit of a revolution in the Royal Academy, which has been only to the good,' Anne Desmet, R.A. Gertrude Hermes was one of the most experimental sculptors of the twentieth century. She also changed the way women artists were treated at the Royal Academy forever – a story which had been overlooked until recently. Representing Britain …

1
S2 Ep2: Sculpting Lives: Veronica Ryan 36:51

2+ y ago36:51

36:51

'I have been preoccupied all my life with a "sense of belonging." Growing up with an awareness of "being apart" has certainly defined who I am now. However, that alienation was in part to do with constantly moving – my parents never stayed in one place when we were younger for very long, so there was little chance of continued friendships, or a fee…

1
S2 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Dora Gordine 39:55

2+ y ago39:55

39:55

“Sculpture has a vital, important message” Dora Gordine (1895-1991) When Dora Gordine died in 1991 leaving her Studio House to the nation, many people, including museum curators, assumed she had been dead for many years. How did an artist described by art critic Jan Gordon in The Observer in 1938 as ‘very possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor…

1
S2: Sculpting Lives Season Two Trailer 0:56

2+ y ago0:56

0:56

Launching on 2nd November 2021, the second series of the Sculpting Lives podcast features episodes on Dora Gordine, Gertrude Hermes, Veronica Ryan, Alison Wilding and Cathie Pilkington. At a moment when public sculpture is the subject of contentious debate, the final episode of the second series focuses on questions of gender, public sculpture and …

1
S3 Ep4: Experiments in Art Writing: Roger Robinson 40:56

3y ago40:56

40:56

This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing. Episode image: Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog, c. 1725, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Yale …

1
S3 Ep3: Experiments in Art Writing: Maria Fusco 40:07

3y ago40:07

40:07

This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing.By Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

1
S3 Ep2: Experiments in Art Writing: Adrian Rifkin 46:32

3+ y ago46:32

46:32

This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing. This programme contains a description of suicide taken from the novel La Fin De Cherí, by Sidonie Gabriel Collette. If you’d prefer to…

1
S3 Ep1: Experiments in Art Writing: Catherine Grant 35:35

3+ y ago35:35

35:35

This series, Experiments In Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing. Episode image: Anna Bunting Branch, W.I.T.C.H. ("Wild Imaginations Transform Chauvinist Hegemony"), oil and acrylic paint on folded al…

1
S2 Ep3: Ryan Gander: DIFFICULT TRUTHS TO LIVE INSIDE - TROUBLE WITH TIME 26:51

3+ y ago26:51

26:51

Ryan Gander’s inventive, shapeshifting and associative works materialise in many forms ranging from sculpture and writing to painting and performance. His engagement with histories is not without mischief, in his 2006 work A Future Lorum Ipsom, Gander invented a palindromic word, ‘Mitim’, designed to be inserted without comment into newspapers, mag…

1
S2 Ep1: Lucy Skaer: Leaving the House 43:27

3+ y ago43:27

43:27

Lucy Skaer has exhibited extensively and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico, SMAK, Gent and Kunstwerke, Berlin, and a current solo show at Bloomberg Mithraeum, London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009 and was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2016. She works in collaboration with as Nashashibi / Skae…

1
S1 Ep7: The Medicinal Garden 44:12

4y ago44:12

44:12

The garden has long been an important subject matter of the British history of art, but what of the medicinal garden, its visual culture and aesthetics, its significance as a sensory and experimental site, and for artists? This episode brings together a set of scholars whose diverse researches shed new light on the physic, botanical and medicinal g…

1
S1 Ep6: “Things in their natural surroundings”?: Marketing the British Country House as Home 36:15

4y ago36:15

36:15

When John, 13th Duke of Bedford, opened up Woburn Abbey to the paying public in 1955, he took care to maintain the sense that this was his family’s home, even though they occupied only a section of the house, away from the tourist route. As he recorded, his wife, Lydia, ‘succeeded most cleverly in arranging the main state-rooms for show while still…

1
S1 Ep5: Exploring London's Art Scene in the 1960s 27:15

4y ago27:15

27:15

Lisa Tickner, a leading historian of British art, has just published a new book on the dynamic art world that emerged in 1960s London. In this podcast, she talks with Mark Hallett about the remarkable array of artists, curators, galleries, art-schools, films, publications and documentaries focused on in the course of her research, and about the hig…

1
S1 Ep4: Hard Times and Late Victorian Art 33:09

4y ago33:09

33:09

This talk focuses on a key instance of the social realism that played an important role in late Victorian art and culture. Hubert von Herkomer’s Hard Times (1885), has to do with conditions of migrant and insecure labour at the time. Artistically, and in its address to vital social issues, it is an intriguing and complex creation. It continues to s…

1
S1 Ep3: The English Carthusians and the Art of Abstinence 30:20

4y ago30:20

30:20

The Carthusian order was founded in the late eleventh century in France. It spread rapidly and widely, and experienced great popularity during the later Middle Ages, when dozens of new charterhouses were founded against a background of sharp decline in monastic foundation in general. The main reason for Carthusian popularity was the order’s consist…

1
S1 Ep2: “What Will Survive of Us Is Love”: Memory and Emotion in Late-Medieval England 31:14

4y ago31:14

31:14

Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying hand-in-hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin would later describe in his celebrated poem, An Arundel Tomb, as their ‘stone fidelity’. These gestural monuments seem to belong to a broader tendency towards ‘expressivity’ in late-medieval sculpture. Whereas the figures on R…

1
S1 Ep1: William Etty and the Classical Body 34:12

4y ago34:12

34:12

William Etty was obsessed with the female form. At the height of his career as a history painter, long after his election to Royal Academician in 1828, he sat side-by-side with novices to study naked models, a practice he continued even as his health faded toward the end of his life. Whether posed alone or in groups, these models served as template…

1
S1 Ep5: Sculpting Lives: Rana Begum 39:21

4+ y ago39:21

39:21

“I don’t want to use a language that really segregates people. I don’t want to use a language that makes them think about gender – if they are looking at a female artist or a male artist.” Rana Begum. Rana was born in Bangladesh and came to Britain as a child. She is an artist who works across sculptural materials and crosses disciplines. She is wo…

1
S1 Ep4: Sculpting Lives: Phyllida Barlow 43:57

4+ y ago43:57

43:57

“The first time I met him he said ‘Because you’re a woman, I’m not that interested because by the time you’re 30 you’ll be having babies and making jam.’” Phyllida Barlow on meeting her art school tutor Reg Butler Barlow is one of the best- known sculptors working in the UK at the moment and has had major international shows. Unrecognised by the wi…

1
S1 Ep3: Sculpting Lives: Kim Lim 39:28

4+ y ago39:28

39:28

“Being female and foreign was never a problem as a student, later I realised that there was a difference, but what was important in the end, was what I did and not where I came from. Race and gender were givens I worked from, perhaps the work does reflect this which is fine, but I did not want to make them an issue.” Kim Lim Kim Lim was born in Sin…

1
S1 Ep2: Sculpting Lives: Elisabeth Frink 40:06

4+ y ago40:06

40:06

Dame Elisabeth Frink, R.A. (1930-1993) “She respected herself. She took herself seriously and she took the work seriously, due to the nature of the work. She knew what it was she wanted to explore.” Annette Ratuszniak, Curator, Frink Estate. In 1973 Elisabeth Frink became the first female sculptor to be elected as a Royal Academician. Frink was bor…

1
S1 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Barbara Hepworth 49:42

4+ y ago49:42

49:42

“Hepworth... didn’t see herself as a feminist at all and didn’t see herself as ‘a pioneering woman’, she just felt she was a pioneering sculptor.” Stephen Feeke, curator and writer. Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in 1903. By the time of her death in 1975, she had become one of the most important artists of the century, crea…

1
S1 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Trailer 0:51

4+ y ago0:51

0:51

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Dame Elisabeth Frink, Kim Lim, Phyllida Barlow, and Rana Begum - some of the most globally well-known British artists are women sculptors. Conversely, the profession and practice of sculpture was seen by many throughout the 20th century (and before) to be very much a man’s world. Often using heavy and hard materials, sculptur…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Paul Mellon Centre For Studies In British Art Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

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British Art Talks

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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Sculpting Lives

Jo Baring and Sarah Turner

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S2 Ep6: Sculpting Lives: Making Sculpture Public 1:02:53

1
S2 Ep5: Sculpting Lives: Cathie Pilkington 34:30

1
S2 Ep4: Sculpting Lives: Alison Wilding 31:17

1
S2 Ep3: Sculpting Lives: Gertrude Hermes 38:27

1
S2 Ep2: Sculpting Lives: Veronica Ryan 36:51

1
S2 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Dora Gordine 39:55

1
S2: Sculpting Lives Season Two Trailer 0:56

1
S3 Ep4: Experiments in Art Writing: Roger Robinson 40:56

1
S3 Ep3: Experiments in Art Writing: Maria Fusco 40:07

1
S3 Ep2: Experiments in Art Writing: Adrian Rifkin 46:32

1
S3 Ep1: Experiments in Art Writing: Catherine Grant 35:35

1
S2 Ep3: Ryan Gander: DIFFICULT TRUTHS TO LIVE INSIDE - TROUBLE WITH TIME 26:51

1
S2 Ep1: Lucy Skaer: Leaving the House 43:27

1
S1 Ep7: The Medicinal Garden 44:12

1
S1 Ep6: “Things in their natural surroundings”?: Marketing the British Country House as Home 36:15

1
S1 Ep5: Exploring London's Art Scene in the 1960s 27:15

1
S1 Ep4: Hard Times and Late Victorian Art 33:09

1
S1 Ep3: The English Carthusians and the Art of Abstinence 30:20

1
S1 Ep2: “What Will Survive of Us Is Love”: Memory and Emotion in Late-Medieval England 31:14

1
S1 Ep1: William Etty and the Classical Body 34:12

1
S1 Ep5: Sculpting Lives: Rana Begum 39:21

1
S1 Ep4: Sculpting Lives: Phyllida Barlow 43:57

1
S1 Ep3: Sculpting Lives: Kim Lim 39:28

1
S1 Ep2: Sculpting Lives: Elisabeth Frink 40:06

1
S1 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Barbara Hepworth 49:42

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S1 Ep1: Sculpting Lives: Trailer 0:51

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