The Montpellier Chapter Collected Works

Collected works

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Art curated by: Jane Lee, Central Saint Martins

Design: [email protected]

©2013 Chapter Hotels

T h e M o n t p e l l i e r C h a p t e r : C o l l e c t e d W o r k s

As with many private collections of contemporary art, this collection has been carefully built for sharing, to be lived with, rather than stored or put on exhibition.

The works were gathered from galleries and artists’ studios, selected with some emotion and evolution of thinking as the hotel has taken shape. It is a collection that reflects the rich variety of the UK art scene, which is truly international and deeply integrated by collaboration and commissions.

The hotel is a living being (unlike a museum), the guests’ voyage through the hotel is not roped off or carefully guarded.

As you enter the room, your room, the art like a person just met, brings with it conversation, encouraging musing, and a way of enjoying your own company. It stimulates memory and association, an appetite for sharing experience, a small step to the side of your life. A hotel is the perfect place for contemporary art.

Chapter Hotels approached Central Saint Martins for some advice on building a collection. We brought that into focus with a strong armature of works by established,

celebrated artists. The character this gave the nascent collection supported the choice of works by younger artists. The collection is built towards the future, risking the gift of Chapter Hotels’ confidence on younger artists, in newer galleries. Several works were acquired from graduate students at Central Saint Martins, and in the process allowed the Chapter Hotels team to become familiar with the art school, its studios and processes. From their own creative industry the Chapter team have always known that a really current work is one in which they are involved from the beginning and which reflects something of the creative turmoil and order of its making. Reflecting this are the photographic works by undergraduate students, featuring sculpture, complete, incomplete or rising slowly from the ephemera of the studio, forming an important part of the collection.

It would be difficult to find a collection more embedded in its moment.

Jane Lee BA Fine Art Course Director Central Saint Martins

Introduction


Alison Crowther Font I 1080mm x 1080mm x 900mm English oak

Alison Crowther intricately carves furniture and sculpture from her studio at the foot of the West Sussex Downs. Since studying at the Royal College of Art, London, she has gained over 20 years experience of exhibiting and working on commissions.

The distinct Font I greets you as you enter The Montpellier Chapter, and is the first of two sequential designs, the second of which resides in The Magdalen Chapter, Exeter. Both works are carved from the butt of the same ancient English oak. Simple and organic, this piece echoes natural growth, and will continue to evolve as the wood seasons.

Alison Crowther


Isabel began her career with a three year ceramicist apprenticeship in Linburg, Germany. From here she went on to undertake an MA in ceramics and glass at the Royal College London in 1998 and has since exhibited regularly, most notably “New Works In Glass” at London’s Vessel Gallery. Since 2002, Isabel Hamm Licht has produced light installations in cooperation with a network of specialist glass and metal craftsmen and experienced light technicians.

“Just like branches of a blooming apple tree, the chandelier’s burnished brass arms twine down from the ceiling. Discrete in its transparency until it becomes dark when the piece becomes an accentuating highlight, illuminating The Conservatory with its 120 handcrafted glass elements.” Isabel Hamm

Isabel Hamm

Isabel HammConservatory Chandelier

1800mm x 1600mm Glass, brass and 37 x 1.2 watt LED

Isabel HammDrawing Room Chandelier

2550mm x 380mm Glass, brass


The current interest in “original print portfolios” was essential to the Chapter collection for Cheltenham and allowed the immediate acquisition of works by very well known artists. The collection now has three portfolios.

The first to be acquired is from Matt’sGallery, the best established and mostinfluential of all London’s experimental East End galleries. These avant garde works bring to the collection the cutting edge of performance, video and installation art in Britain, in prints by artists such as Willie Doherty and Mike Nelson. The techniques vary from Susan Hiller’s photo-etching and aquatint on copperplate to Matthew Tickle’s archival digital inkjet. As do the scale and shape of the prints which include Jo Bruton’s concertina folded silkscreen with silver, Capitaine Can Can and the double sided “before and after” lithograph Volcano Lady in which Hayley Newman encapsulates her performance.

The Birds Portfolio and the BugsCollection are both the result of acollaboration between some of Britain’s best known artists and the Byam Shaw

School of Art. The Birds series represents artists whose works have been celebrated for the last thirty years such as Paula Rego, Barry Flanagan, Craigie Aitchison and Prunella Clough. The Bugs series is of a current generation of artists whose names will be equally well known by many of the Hotel’s guests. The fascination in both of these sets is the variety of the images, between Norman Ackroyd’s Cormorant, silhouetted against the sky over the river, and Patrick Caulfield’s sleek emblematic Duck, one form with its shadow.

The Bugs series is even richer in imaginative imagery including Cornelia Parker’s The Spider that Died in the Tower of London, Peter Doig’s Kings Cross Mosquito, and Yinka Shonibari’s Grain Weevil. The Night Moth by Brad Lachore and Mittens and Moth Eggs by Kathy Prendergast suggest that our own experience of bugs is filled with a wide range of emotions.

The Print Collection

T h e P r i n t C o l l e c t i o n : M a t t ’ s G a l l e r y

Hayley NewmanVolcano Lady 297mm x 392mm Offset lithograph (printed both sides)


Suzanne TreisterAlchemy/The Sun 297mm x 420mm Photo-etching

Melanie JacksonThe Scavenger’s Loot 297mm x 420mm Letterpress

Avis NewmanInfinity Doubled 297mm x 420mm Photo-etching and aquatint


Jo Bruton Capitaine Can Can

687mm x 296mm (3 concertina folds) Silkscreen


Susan HillerThe Fight 420mm x 297mm Photo-etching and aquatint on copperplate

David OsbaldestonA Trade Double 420mm x 297mm Lithograph


Jimmie DurhamOur House 420mm x 297mm Dry point on copperplate

Alison TurnbullPlant Bands and Systematic 420mm x 297mm Photo-etching

Nathaniel MellorsTime Surgeon Performer’s Mask 297mm x 420mm Offset lithograph


John RiddyMuizenberg (Sea View) 420mm x 297mm Ultrachrome Print

Willie DohertyNon Specific Threat 420mm x 297mm Photographic print

Mike NelsonHeroin Room (The Coral Reef) 297mm x 420mm Lithograph


Fiona CrispNorwegian Series #3 420mm x 297mm Digital archival inkjet print

Matthew TickleNowhere 420mm x 297mm Digital archival inkjet print

T h e P r i n t C o l l e c t i o n : B y a m S h a w S c h o o l o f A r t , B i r d s P o r t f o l i o

Norman AckroydCormorant 420mm x 297mm Aquatint

Prunella CloughStarling 420mm x 297mm Soft ground etching


Patrick CaulfieldDuck 297mm x 420mm Silkscreen

Maggie HamblingHeron 297mm x 420mm Sugar lift and aquatint

Craigie AitchisonMagpies 297mm x 420mm Lithograph


Barry FlanaganPasserines 420mm x 297mm Etching and aquatint

Jeffery CampPigeons 420mm x 297mm Lithograph


John BellanyGull 297mm x 420mm Etching

Paula RegoCrow 297mm x 420mm Etching and aquatint

T h e P r i n t C o l l e c t i o n : B y a m S h a w S c h o o l o f A r t , B u g s C o l l e c t i o n

Yinka ShonibareGrain Weevil 420mm x 297mm Offset lithograph with gloss spot UV varnish

Peter DoigKings Cross Mosquito 420mm x 297mm 2 plate colour etching, sugar lift & dry point


Mark WallingerKing Edward and the Colorado Beetle 297mm x 420mm Unique potato print

Fiona BannerSwarm 297mm x 420mm Etching

Anya GallacioSpiders Leg at 400x 297mm x 420mm Silver gelatin print


Cornelia ParkerThe Spider that Died in the Tower of London 420mm x 297mm Digital archival inkjet print

Kathy PrendegastMittens and Moth Eggs 420mm x 297mm Digital archival inkjet print


Tacita DeanWasp 420mm x 297mm C-type print

Brad LachoreNight Moth 420mm x 297mm Digital archival inkjet print

T h e F o l d G a l l e r y H a c k n e y

The very particular aesthetic of the Bugs series had an effect on the acquisition, made at the same time, of works from the Fold Gallery in Hackney. Two paintings by Simon Willems quickly entered into the conversations which had begun in the print collection. The small painting, Animal Secrets, is fascinating in its call to infinity in confounding the enormously expansive and the absolutely minute. Whilst Willems’ large and impressive canvas, Lend me your Prophet, engages on overwhelming tactility in exoskeletal beauty.

At this young and very innovative gallery the collection also acquired two sculptures. Both deal with surprise and illusion and both are curios; intriguing objects like bugs in Victorian collections. Alex Robbins’ Dictionary of Angels is an illusion of a book which is only the book’s object. Abandoned, it asserts itself in contradiction when it is lifted and reveals itself as a perfect replica. The other wooden object is only light. Richard Clements’ Untitled hologram of wood is hypnotic in its call for solidity in spite of its own immateriality.

The Fold Gallery, Hackney

Richard ClementsUntitled 105mm x 148mm Denisyuk hologram

Alex RobbinsDictionary of Angels 300mm x 400mm Wood and acrylic

T h e F o l d G a l l e r y H a c k n e y

Simon WillemsAnimal Secrets

670mm x 790mm Collage & acrylic on canvas

Simon WillemsLend me Your Prophet 2007mm x 1702mm Collage & acrylic on canvas

At the heart of the collection there are ten paintings and two sculptures which were chosen to indicate the collection’s character and to mark its quality. Some of these works were acquired directly from the artist’s studio, conversations with the artists helping to refine an understanding of the collection’s focus.

Some major works

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : D a v i d L e e s o n

David Leeson is a painter who lives and works in the East End of London where his work is much admired. With two other London painters he edits the journal, “Turps Banana”, which is celebrated as the only journal in which, exclusively, painters write about painters. Through it David is influential here and in other contemporary art centres such as New York. His work is erudite and profoundly rooted in the discipline of painting. The agility and adept handling which produce such an arresting and engaging image depend on skills and considerations refined over years of studio practice, rigorous discernment and bold experimentation.

Enmeshed in the layers of the Untitled painting in the Chapter Collection are many of the artist’s prevailing interests, including cartography, ariel photography and the syncopations of jazz. We can appreciate these in the finding and re-defining of shifting spatial extensions in the planar body of the work and the lyric drawing which activates all parts of the canvas.

David Leeson

David LeesonUntitled 1508mm x 1388mm Oil on canvas

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s

Irene GunstonThe Offering 650mm x 470mm x 760mm Bronze

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : I r e n e G u n s t o n

Irene Gunston is a Welsh sculptor who is now the Head of the Foundry at the Royal College of Art. Whilst she does have works in several British collections, it is in Italy where she is most profoundly represented and subsequently celebrated as equal to modern Italian masters such as Arturo Martini and Marino Marini. She is also the sole bronze sculptor to forge for that narrow stream of modernism a contemporary form. That form is a human one, sensitive to the body’s never ending return to a gesture or pose that carries our lassitude or energy. Modelled for us is the shape that our will and our acceptance make in the world.

Gunston has shared her insight and her skill with many other sculptors in her foundry collaborations. She is also celebrated as a medallist and these small works are collected by Britain’s numismatists as well as by contemporary art collectors. As an expert in bronze she is consulted by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert and has done a great deal to help preserve bronze public sculptures.

Irene Gunston

Irene GunstonShower II 1448mm x 686mm x 686mm Bronze


Mario Rossi is a Scottish artist who has for many years lived on the south coast of England where the channel waters often provide the motif for his visionary and carefully worked paintings. If the power of nature provides the sublime in his works, its force is increased by the negligence, vanity and haplessness of man. His themes are often taken from the stream of human drama which the daily newspapers record, seizing an incident which, through the medium of his imaging, can indicate the human condition. In this he follows the tradition of the greatest of romantic painters, Theodore Gericault.

Rossi, a Whitechapel Gallery prize winner has works in the collections of the Arts Councils of both Scotland and England. He features in collections as diverse as the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Saatchi Collection.

Mario Rossi

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : M a r i o R o s s i

Mario RossiMario Rossi

2400mm x 1530mm Oil on canvas


John Hooper is a London artist whose studio in the East End has always generously welcomed younger artists attracted by the intensity and fine judgement of his painting.

His “system” works by the construction of a grid and the sequence in the distribution of colours are predetermined, but the choice of palette and the colour saturation or thickness of paint are continually re-judged in the making. Along the sides one can catch sight of the key to the process over time in the marking of dates and colours. This underscores the importance of a sense of the process surviving their completion.

Two deep interests of Hooper conjoin in such works. One is his origin in a school of English landscape painting which tracked evenly with the eye across the visual field of the motif locating the distances between the things in the world, noting them on the canvas, and so allowing a grid to form. The other is his abiding love of modern and contemporary classical music. Hooper exhibits regularly at the Beardsmore Gallery in London and his works are in many British and international collections.

John Hooper

John HooperUntitled 914mm x 711mm Acrylic on canvas

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : J o h n H o o p e r

John HooperUntitled

1016mm x 762mm Acrylic on canvas


Joel Tomlin moved from Sheffield to London to study at the Royal College. He remained, setting up his studio in the East End and making his debut among collectors with a celebrated one man show at Max Wigram Gallery. His work is influential among contemporary artists and available in exhibitions held in East End venues such as the Transition Gallery which have set the standard recently in contemporary British and European art.

Tomlin’s studio hardly differs from one in the eighteenth century. As well as works finished and incomplete there are drawing books and sketches everywhere and the evidence of studies in colour and composition. He paints on a finer, lighter weight material than the canvas normally used by painters and prefers tapestry making cloth as a painting support. This is often left “in reserve” in his works, showing through the composition as it might in watercolour and sustaining the drawing quality in his paintings. His work is skilful in its painting and in its poetry and his love of Watteau and other masters of that age is evident. Like their work, his is spare and deft but releases an infinity of half-told things.

Joel Tomlin

Joel TomlinWishbone 2000mm x 1800mm Oil on linen

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : J o e l To m l i n / J a n e H a r r i s

Jane Harris lives in France but shows regularly in England particularly at Hales Gallery where Yellow Flower was acquired for the collection.

Harris builds a strange and luxurious surface on her paintings which often seems silken or metallic to the eye. The density and light absorbing or reflecting qualities of the paints she uses are richly apparent. The form and the drawing works the surface material itself as though it were a sculptor’s rather than a painter’s material. There is a paradox and a play on the real weight of this material, and the illusions of weight and distance that line and colour juxtapositions can bring to painting. All of Harris’ works call to long developed, if not classical, concepts of beauty. This work plays between the reference to distance of a Renaissance perspective painting, a di sotto in su perhaps in which we are looking up through a painted illusion of a window into a blue sky, and the surface reality of ornament, in a rich tradition of Oriental as well as Western design.

Jane Harris

Jane HarrisYellow Flower

1980mm x 1830mm Oil on canvas

Trained at the Central School of Art and Design, and then at the Royal College of Art, Mark Wright’s work is elegant and inventive. His paintings use layers, glazes, airbrush and fluorescent colour, creating a depth of field that relates to photography.

These paintings take up directly what might be called the beauty issue. There is a sweetness and light pervading the painting, candy or electric colours and a high finish. The imagery is layered, concealed behind the varnish. There is a micro–symmetry within the motifs and a macro-dysymmetry in the composition of each painting. It is a mannerist elevation of artifice within the frame of painting which, despite its references, never quite gives in to landscape. These paintings are rather screens which carry wholly artificial signs towards the remnants of another image of a natural world.

There are pointers to particular epistemic systems, to sciences for example, which have drifted too far to be accessible any longer.

Mark Wright

Right: Mark WrightInvisible Plants 1520mm x 1520mm Acrylic and oil on canvas

Left: Mark WrightNightshade 1520mm x 1520mm Acrylic and oil on canvas

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : M a r k W r i g h t

Gavin Lockheart, born in Staffordshire in 1961 and studied at Stourbridge College and St.Martins school of Art. Now lives and works in Bermondsey, South London, exhibiting regularly within the UK and Europe.

The pieces chosen for The Montpellier Chapter, although painted six years apart, originate from the same image of boys playing football, a photo taken in the large garden of a country pub in the Midlands. The scene is idyllic, frozen in time, one boy forever about to take a kick. Painted for the viewer to appear to have happened upon the game but separated from the foreground by the foliage and flowers.

The title “England in Colour” is that of a book of photographs which features English countryside in the 1950s, pastoral scenes. Gavin creates an almost sun-bleached appearance, with not much colour, and the flowers, hard edged, scattered over the surface of the canvas.

In The Heart of England is the Midlands, Gavin recollects idealised happy memories of his childhood, utilising the disparate images and snapshots from his past. The boys could be Lockheart himself, with the figures creating part of the landscape. These snapshots of the game, Gavin continues to find himself returning to in later paintings.

Gavin Lockheart

Gavin LockheartThe (Big) Heart of England (study) 560mm x 560mm Oil on canvas


Gavin LockheartEngland in Colour 1370mm x 1140mm Oil on canvas

S o m e M a j o r W o r k s : G a v i n L o c k h e a r t

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s

Around the works by very established artists, the collection acquired works by younger artists, graduates who were studying in the Masters degree at Central Saint Martins. The Masters annual exhibition at the Bargehouse on the South Bank in London made it possible to view a great number of works and to select those which would most enrich the collection.

Works by younger artists

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s : E m i l y L o c k r e n

The eight small paintings by Emily Lockren which have come into the collection are representative of the best of young contemporary painting. Like many of her generation Lockren considers how she can make paintings in such an image-saturated society. She is interested not in the didactic rhetoric of most of society’s image making, but rather in “how the forms of things in the periphery are abstracted, inaccurate, blurred”. She is interested also in paintings’ development of an inner logic through the distortions of a fluid medium. The smudged drawing and reference to reproduction in the Astronaut paintings and the hesitant settling upon the surface of bold blocks of colour in the Soldier paintings give the works a delicate, ephemeral, even memorial quality while constructing a lasting, engaging image.

Emily Lockren

Emily LockrenAstronaut Set 200mm x 300mm each Oil on canvas

Emily LockrenSoldier Set 500mm x 600mm each Oil on canvas


Manali ShroffFlight of Time 600mm x 300mm Oil on canvas (diptych)

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s : M a n a l i S h r o f f

Manali Shroff has said that he draws upon vision and strange encounters during walks in a mundane life, collecting his inspiration from everyday experiences which nevertheless end up forming a unique visual lexicon. “While strolling down the streets one might come across some momentary vision, which might only last a fraction of a second but leave an enchanting effect on you”. He writes of “the mystical factors of the city, the lampposts’ long everlasting shadows, the swarm of mosquitoes in the spotlight, the cat as she silently slips through the window”. The calm, the mysterious stillness, of the paintings, achieved in the close tones of the colours and the even distribution of paint in small touches, establishes this poetic programme in all the works. The simplicity of the imagery creates philosophical models from that poetry.

Manali Shroff

Manali ShroffDog, Lamp and Bird Diptych 760mm x 1500mm Oil on canvas (diptych)


Mika Revell is always on the lookout for phrases which can be lifted from their context into a far wider and more profound re-use. A well-travelled, almost nomadic, artist Revell has immersed herself in the urban world text. Some of these phrases reflect her trips on California freeways, from advertisements, from chance events in her own movement around the globe. The letters are made to emerge in many ways from their background, scratched graffiti, “faralitos” the brown paper bag lanterns of New Mexico, the enamelled engraved or painted signs which are “officially” ours in the streets. As in Look Inwards, pictured as a crosswalk direction, these works are a subversion of the constant stream of direction we are given in a suggestion towards contemplation and reflection.

Mika Revell

Mika RevellLook Inwards 1210mm x 920mm Photographic print

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s : M i k a R e v e l l

Mika RevellIf You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now 1210mm x 920mm Photographic print

Mika RevellGo Slow 1210mm x 920mm Photographic print


Anthony WardDrying out the Tricolore 2100mm x 1300mm Oil on canvas

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s : A n t h o n y W a r d

Anthony Ward’s Drying out the Tricolore is a classical landscape in disguise. This is a postmodern kind of painting which says Pop and means Poussin. Brightly coloured with an ironic reference to popular celebrations it could leave you wondering why it has no trouble controlling the room, dominating your view and your experience of the architecture around you. Ward writes sparingly about his paintings, “on the whole the painting confronts a background with a figure.” Indeed, in this work, it does and in the manner of the seventeenth century. Ward’s painting is very strongly composed along the geometric divisions of classical landscape, with its repeated sectioning vertically and horizontally and its symmetry around a dominant vertical. A gentle and strongly coloured figurative painting of abandoned bunting is also a powerful formal device. This is representative of one of the real strengths in postmodern practices in contemporary painting. The practice of the seventeenth century masters is entirely redeveloped in a painting or our time.

Anthony Ward


Polly Yates studied Fine Art ( Sculpture) at Wimbledon School of Art, recently completing her MA at Central Saint Martins. Originally from Stockport, Polly’s work is now exhibited nationally and internationally. Polly now lives and works in Chicago.

This series of screen print collages references the first English female botanical illustrator, and the first woman in America to gain a degree in Medicine. Both of these women shared the name Elizabeth Blackwell. Yates’ work celebrates their work and reconfigures it with a sense of abundance and fluidity. It is an exploration of heritage, of how we come to be who we are, and a positive affirmation of what, and who went before us.

Polly Yates

Polly YatesAriftolochia Rotunda Spasm, after Elizabeth Blackwell 560mm x 760mm Handpainted screenprint collage

Polly YatesBalfamina Foemina Spasm, after Elizabeth Blackwell 560mm x 760mm Handpainted screenprint collage

W o r k s b y Yo u n g e r A r t i s t s : P o l l y Ya t e s / L i n n P e d e r s o n

Like Anthony Ward, Linn Pedersen expects her work to “move naturally between sentimentality and irony”. She describes the photo collages which have entered the collection as “fleeting thought maps where there is never one single image dominating the motif but rather a well of details constituting a common body”. The layering of text and fragmented image invites our approach and finally demands our minute attention. In a sense we have to read these images but their idiosyncrasy stops their easy translation and returns us to simple perception and an attention to material qualities and their surroundings.

It returns us to the context which one fragment necessarily provides for all others. This is why they work so well as maps. What they map is reverie, that almost dreaming state one can enjoy without losing control of thought, which is a fundamentally creative state for the viewer.

Linn Pederson

Linn PedersonFramed Photographic Works 215mm x 300mm each Photo-collage

The integration of the collection with the work of Central Saint Martins included, from the outset of the project, the chance for direct collaboration in the making of new works. The undergraduate sculpture students worked across a number of disciplines including photography, sculpture and performance to create their collection of images.

The Chapter team agreed that the energy of the sculpture studio was at the centre of the set of new images they wanted for the collection. Students and artist tutors photographed sculptures, finished or unfinished, models for sculpture, complete and incomplete installations. Also photographed were collections of materials which had been brought together to inspire sculpture or were left as the residue of the constant building and dismantling which characterizes this studio.

The commission was driven technically by Shelley Rose, one of the country’s best print technicians, whose skills brought the highest standards of production to the project and made the best use of the Colleges own considerable digital printmaking facility.

Others are inviting because the materials that are offered to view call up the sense

in all of us of play and the urge to arrangement and construction. Simple materials, such as the wood in the photo print by York Ishida, for instance, arranged seemingly haphazardly like giant pick-up-sticks, seem to wait for our intervention, inviting us into their angles and shadows. At the same time, as we become familiar with the print, we become increasingly aware of the intention in the lighting and the drawing it creates and realise the studio experiment in which we are taking part.

Gathered materials are already active, making the piece in the studio by exhibiting unending potential, laying out a field in which the artist will make deft judgements or cause gradual expansion. This is richly apparent in images like those by Rebecca Truran. All the potential for her elaborate meshes and all their meaning is latent in the gathered strings, cords and maps. The quiet natural tones of the materials already record the gentle progress of the net which will overwhelm your space.

There are some sculptor’s studios in which the materials are already heavy with stories and the work can be made by the viewer of the photographic image in the same way one might read a rebus puzzle. Sandra Saldanha’s studio materials are all

souvenirs of a particular childhood. The deep reds and browns bring warmth and a sense of life but like all souvenirs the greater the number of objects, the greater the underlying sense of loss and the melancholic note to beauty.

Eventually these latent sculptures take on their form and in doing so they very often refer to the form we know best, the human form. In building upright figures from wood and plasticine Craig Barnes is following the age old need to build something to which one can address oneself. It may have the look of Don Quixote’s horse but this erect figure is the answer to our own alert and standing presence. Like Picasso’s Goat of Wood and Baskets this confident but brutally simple figure not only stands upright but stands for all of our transformations of one object into another all of the play and building that we do in life.

Sara Cook’s casts of human “digits” is a reminder that the digital is only the result of thousands of generations of counting on fingers and toes. These smooth and glossy porcelain casts from the body close the distance between the body and man’s measuring into infinity.

Commissioned works

C o m m i s s i o n e d W o r k s

York IshidaWaiting Wood

Digital print

Annie Rouze-BlanchetBaby Legs with Spheres

Digital print


Rebecca Truran Gathered String Digital print

Craig BarnesWood and Plasticine ModeDigital print


Sandra SaldanhaThe Dress Digital print

Sara CookTen Commandments in Porcelain Digital print

The commission allowed us at Central Saint Martins to provide extra staff time, equipment and consumables to explore with our students the nature of photographic space in the practice of sculpture. It was a very successful studio research project. It also allowed us to bring our students into contact with the process of private collection and to discuss some of the professional areas of their own careers. We were very happy to be able to follow this project with a similar commission among our video artists to provide short works for the collection.

Like all universities we value direct and sustained contact with creative partners particularly where the partnership reaches into the student experience. The process of collecting with Chapter has been an excellent example of this and we are very glad to have had such an opportunity. The collection is now for you to enjoy, and in doing so understand that the collection has increased the potential of young artists to create and sustain new art practices both in Britain and abroad. At Central Saint Martins we have a great reputation to uphold and we are glad to unite it with the great reputation for creative thinking which is that of the patron of this collection.


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The Montpellier Chapter Collected Works

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