MESSUMS ONLINE: Recent Episodes
Messums Online
Messums Online is an online portal to an ongoing series of talks and discussions on art, craftsmanship and set against the backdrop of environmental thinking.
“Art is a means of developing insight, deepening understanding and finding the means to elaborate and engage in individual and collective. Our talks engage with the creative process and the spirit of enquiry at its heart” Johnny Messum
PART 1: Active Environmentalism – We can’t value what we don’t know January - May 2021
PART 2: Making: Its significance, process and meaning March – April 2021
From as early as the 1970s John Walker was one of the most influential and imitated painters working in the UK; he exhibited alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, represented his country at the 1972 Venice Biennale, had extensive survey shows at both the Tate and Hayward galleries and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.
On the occasion of Walker's exhibition at Messums London, we present a conversation between John and Jonathan Watkins. Jonathan Watkins is an English curator, and the former Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
Ceramic artist Kitty Shepherd specialises in slipware, the technique of painting on damp clay using coloured slip and through her designs she creates dynamic and joyful works of art that evoke feelings of nostalgia and joy. Kitty arrived in Spain rather by accident, but the circumstances had a positive and direct effect on her work. Her upbringing might be considered unorthodox and Kitty talks candidly to radio broadcaster Ian Rutter about her mysterious father, her maverick mother and an idyllic Sussex childhood.
Narbi Price is a painter. Born 1979 in Hartlepool, he lives and works in Gateshead and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
He was the Journal Culture Awards Visual Artist of the Year 2018, and the winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2017. He was featured in Phaidon's Vitamin P3 - New Perspectives in Painting and was a prizewinner in the John Moores Painting Prize 2012.
He has recently completed an AHRC funded PhD at Newcastle University in partnership with Woodhorn Museum.
Interview with Ian 'Mouseman' Cartwright', head carpenter and great grandson of Robert 'Mouseman' Thompson who founded Robert Thompson's Craftsmen Ltd the oak furniture company famous for it's great craftsmanship and the handcarved mouse on each piece they make.
Podcast interview with gallery owner Johnny Messum and the artist Jo York.
"My work comes from a strong sense of place derived from walking in the landscape; absorbing it in all weathers, seasons and moods. Landscapes are full of layers; geological and historical, industrial and personal- they carry traces of what’s gone before, and this is what fascinates and intrigues me. I abstract ideas from the landscapes I know well, using observation, imagination and memory. Current work is exploring margins in those areas where land, sea, water and sky, shift and merge and change, and the wild landscapes of North Yorkshire, Cornwall and Scotland are recurring themes.
Paintings are made slowly, building multiple layers and often scraping back and incising detail, before glazing over the top, to create a complex picture surface. Acrylics are central to my practice as I love their flexibility and immediacy, but I also work in oils, mixed media, textiles and print."
Hugo Burge is the owner and led an 8 year restoration of Marchmont House, winner of Sothebys Historic House restoration award of the year in 2018. Hugo has plans to now bring it alive as ‘a Home for Makers and Creators’ in the Scottish Borders.
He is also a sculpture collector and has a passion for the arts and crafts movement.
Recorded on Wednesday 14 April 2021.
From lacemakers to vascular surgeons; Savile Row tailors to molecular scientists, potters to violinists or racing car drivers – those from apparently unrelated professions all use their hands.
After a lifetime spent in the medical profession, conducting surgery in war zones and trauma wards to reach the peak of his profession, Kneebone combines his experiences as a doctor with insights from the fields of art, science and music to understand the importance of manual dexterity for our well-being and wider culture.
Kneebone, who is Professor Of Surgical Education at Imperial College, London, has written numerous papers and essays about how the loss of manual skills is impacting on our creativity, productivity and mental health and will also be discussing his podcast, Countercurrents as well as his new book, ‘Expert; Understanding the Path to Mastery’ in which he reveals the process by which humans learn how to perfect their skills.
‘Roger Kneebone is a legend’ Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters
‘Fascinating and inspiring’ Financial Times
‘The pandemic has made the necessity of relying on experts evident to all . . . this is a rich exploration of lifelong learning’ Guardian
Recorded on Wednesday 21 April 2021
Online talk by author and biographer William Feaver as he discussed the life and work of the artist Lucian Freud.
Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke every week for decades to his close confidante and collaborator, the art critic, curator, artist and lecturer William Feaver – about painting and the art world, but also about his infamously colourful life and loves. The result is a unique biography, shot through with Freud’s own words, ‘The Lives of Lucian Freud’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize.
Feaver is currently an academic board member of the Royal Drawing School.
Based from his North Yorkshire studio, William Watson-West is a painter whose first-hand observations of landscape, flora and fauna are the basis of his work.
Graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2011 with a degree in Textiles, William has since exhibited his mixed-media paintings at several galleries in the north of England, including 108 Fine Art and the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate. He has previously been shortlisted for the prestigious New Light Art Prize and has been selected for the Great North Art Show amongst others. His painting, 'Swinsty in Autumn' was the 2019 winner of the Best Picture Award at the 20th Anniversary Ilkley Art Show.
Suman Kaur won the best amateur artist in the BBC Big Painting Challenge 2017. Since then she has been improving her practice and building on her skills. As a British Sikh, Suman is keen to establish herself as a professional painter and to document and reflect on Sikh history in her work.
Sally Barker works with sculpture, installation, ceramics, printing, video, and the occasional performance. Her interests focus on power, control and damage across the distinct but connected areas of feminism and the environment. These themes are expressed through a strong sense of touch and materiality, coupled with acts of breaking down and dismantling.
Joe's path to becoming a sculptor started at a young age, choosing clay and 3D work over drawing and painting where ever he could, he stood out among his fellow school pupils as a gifted artist.
A lifelong passion for art and sculpture together with his practical nature led him to take up an apprenticeship in stone masonry. Masonry combined design with hands on physical work that suited his creative personality.
Joe worked as a stone mason for several years and became experienced in many aspects of the craft. His particular interest in sculpture together with his flare for stone carving drove him to establish his own business and become a sculptor full time. Opening his own workshop and gallery in early 2012, his work is already in private collections spanning from Glasgow to London.
Human form and in particular the head inspire Joes work. He creates unique figurative pieces as well as portrait sculpture in both stone and bronze. He also produces bespoke stone work including the design, creation and installation of stone fireplaces and all other ornate stone work.
Photo: James Hardisty
Recorded on Wednesday 31 March 2021
What Powers Creativity? The relationship between Patron, inspiration and problem solving is at the heart of some of the worlds most incredible creative endeavours. Winch Design has built a career taking imagination and partnering craftspeople who know how to make it possible.
Join us for a discussion on the role of patronage in supporting the crafts that all started in the Yacht building industry and did not stop there. Andrew Winch’s love of yachts was ignited in childhood, during long summers spent sailing the Solent in his father’s 42ft (12m) Beneteau. He completed a degree in 3D Design at Kingston College of Art, and then went on to gain experience as a skipper in the Caribbean, followed by an apprenticeship for acclaimed yacht designer, Jon Bannenberg. His love of yachts would persist through adulthood and inform his entire life’s work, leading him and his wife Jane, as designer and company manager, to establish Winch Design in 1986.
In the three decades since Winch Design was established, the business has grown exponentially. The architecture portfolio spans interiors, exteriors, chateaux, beach villas and mountain retreats and the yachts and aviation departments have produced sailing yachts, motor yachts and aircraft ranging from helicopters to the first-ever private Boeing 787/9 Dreamliner. In that time Winch Design has won over 30 prestigious design awards and come to be recognised as one of the leading international design studios in the world.
Since graduating from London College of Fashion with first class honours, photographer Ben Benoliel has gone on to produce acclaimed commercial and editorial work for print and digital publication.His clients include Bang & Olufsen, Muji, John Lobb, LN-CC, size?, Loewe, i-D, Matches, APC and Wallpaper.com amongst others.
He continues his work as photographer for internationally respected fashion designer Nigel Cabourn as well as launching ‘The Artists Pad’ with best friend and fellow photographer Neil Bedford. In March 2020 Ben returned to LN-CC to take the roles Head of Studio and Head of Staff.
Neil Bedford's wide body of work spans portraiture, including an impressive list of A-list celebrities. His work also includes documentary, fashion and music.
Talk with David Goodhart discussing the status of work outside the knowledge economy & reviving the status of work by heart & hand.
Author and journalist David Goodhart discussed and presented the ideas from his latest book ‘Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century’.
In this timely and original analysis, David Goodhart divides human aptitudes into three: Head (cognitive), Hand (manual and craft) and Heart (caring, emotional). It’s common sense that a good society needs to recognise the value of all three, but in recent decades they have got badly out of kilter. Cognitive ability has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society largely in its own interests, by prioritising the knowledge economy, ever-expanding higher education and shaping the very idea of a successful life.
Head, Hand, Heart tells the story of the cognitive takeover that has gathered pace over the past forty years. As recently as the 1970s most people left school without qualifications, but now 40 per cent of all jobs are graduate-only. A good society must re-imagine the meaning of skilled work, so that people who work with their hands and hearts are valued.
David Goodhart is the founding editor of Prospect magazine and one of the most distinctive voices on politics today. He is currently head of the Demography Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange, and was previously director of the centre-left think tank Demos.
A discussion with the curator and writer Glenn Adamson as he introduces his new book on crafts and making.
Glenn Adamson Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art and formerly Head of Research at the V&A and Director of the Museum of Arts in New York talks about his new book Craft; an American History. The talk examines the role played by craftspeople; ‘the quiet heroes of the American story.’ Adamson will also discuss the influence of craftspeople from Britain who migrated across the Atlantic and reflect on how, as craft has become increasingly marginalised in modern Western economies, overall levels of social cohesion have also deteriorated and thus how important it is to this day. A central theme in Glenn Adamson’s work has been modern craft: the application of skilled making to the world around us. His new book is concerned with American craft and building societies through making.
Glenn Adamson works at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art. Currently Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, he has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.
Recorded on Wednesday 10 March, as part of our Active Environmentalism series of talks and events.
The RSPB’s Beccy Speight discussed what our migrating & permanent residents tell us about wider changes to the environment. What does the study of birds tell us about changes to the environment and our potential for change?
The RSPB is the largest nature conservation charity in Europe. Since it’s inception in 1889 the threats to birdlife and their habitats have continued to grow but the RSPB have ambitious and wide-reaching conservation plans to change the fate of nature. Rebecca Speight is Chief Executive of the RSPB since 2019. She was previously the Chief Executive of the Woodland Trust.
The RSPB has more than 1.2 million members, over 2,000 employees and around 12,000 volunteers. It has over 200 nature reserves across the UK, wild havens where everyone can get closer to nature and home to 80 per cent of our rarest or more threatened bird species. The RSPB also works internationally and is a leading player in BirdLife International, a partnership of conservation organisations working to save nature across the world.
Recorded in March 2021
Welsh designer, Based in Leeds UK. Laura Wellington has a passion for materials, process and the fine details.
Laura arrived in Leeds in 2005 and since graduating from her degree in 2008 she has gained international press and transatlantic clients. In 2011 Laura featured on the BBC TV Program “Britains Next Big Thing” which charted her taking HULA to the High Street. In 2014 HULA was listed as one of the most iconic Habitat designs in the last 50 yrs.
Laura has most definitely made Leeds her home and as well as making and creating in her studio, Laura has Co-Founded Duke Studios alongside her partner James Abbott-Donnelly.
Recorded in March 2021
Emerson Mayes is a Yorkshire-born artist who continues to enjoy an ever-growing reputation for the fresh, honest and uncontrived approach to his work.
Throughout his career he has received a number of major awards and had many successful exhibitions across the country.
His work can be found in numerous private, corporate and public collections - including The House of Lords and the National Trust.
Interview recorded in March 2021
"I create multi-layered, semi-abstract paintings in which landscape serves as a jumping off point for exploration – an exploration of my own feelings, perceptions, and moods, but also an exploration of paint, colour, line, and texture. The results are often surprising, offering a sense of place while also hinting at multiple deeper meanings.
My paintings evolve over time, layer upon layer, and in this way, they mirror life and the landscape that has inspired them. Each new layer adds depth, but the history remains underneath and is glimpsed now and again. Each mark is evidence of what went before, each colour choice reflects the moment in which it was chosen. Just as in life, nothing can ever be fully erased; nothing is ever without meaning."
Interview recorded in March 2021.
Born in York, where he first studied painting, Jake Attree graduated from Liverpool College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. He now lives with his wife, Lindsay, in the West Yorkshire village of Saltaire, near Bradford, and maintains a studio at Dean Clough in Halifax.
Yorkshire’s geology, history and culture are woven into Attree’s creative DNA, but while he was born in the North and lives there still, Attree dislikes the term “northern artist”, if only because it is hopelessly limited:
*I was initially, and still am, deeply influenced by the art of Northern Europe, principally because, I suppose, I am northern European. The light Rubens responded to in seventeenth-century Flanders later influenced Constable in nineteenth-century Suffolk, and later still, Constable opened my eyes to the light of the flat, water meadow-surrounded city of York.
As I developed and dug deeper, and began to look wider, at the magnificent bronze sculpture of Benin, for example; at Iznik tiles and the beauty woven into Persian carpets, it slowly began to dawn on me that this is one culture; an artist from one country recognising the gift offered by another (or appropriated from it, depending on one’s point of view). I recognised in this diverse range of expression one voice that speaks of the need to assert our equality of achievement and purpose, our need to assert a common humanity.*
An online panel discussion with Steve Dixon, Dr Penny Hay and Annie Warburton as they discussed the importance of the imagination in making. When most schools have thrown away their kilns and waking up to a world that has been modelled on consumption and now faces an epidemic of mental health problems, we discuss why using simply our hands and imagination may be the radical and necessary solution.
The way children and young adults are taught how to make art is the focus of this discussion with Dr Penny Hay, Senior Lecturer in Arts Education, Bath Spa University and Director of Research & Founder of the House of Imagination, Annie Warburton, Chair of the Craft and Design panel for the Government’s new T (technical) examinations and Chief Executive of Cockpit Arts and Steve Dixon, Professor of Contemporary Crafts at Manchester School of Art. They will discuss the importance of being taught technical and practical skills in art and the best way to foster creative thought and imagination for a future which will need thinking outside the box more than ever.
Recorded on Wednesday 3 March 2021, as part of our Active Environmentalism series of talks and exhibitions. Conversation with James Arbib, founder of RethinkX, an independent not-for-profit think tank looking at technology-driven disruption & implications across society.
Against a backdrop of a generation instinctively calling for more immediate action on climate, what role can technology play and how we avoid prescribing a medicine worse than the disease? James explored how we have been blindsided to disruptive change in our past and how our current problems are also a wellspring for a revolution of creative solutions.
Recorded on Wednesday 24 February 2021.
Online conversation with Sir Tim Smit where we debated radical thinking at the intersection of science, necessity and the environment.
Sir Tim Smit KBE is a leading environmentalist and businessman particularly recognised for his work on the Lost Gardens of Heligan and founding the Eden Project International.
Smit developed the Eden project in 1996 with the aim to educate people about ecological matters and encourages a greater understanding and empathy for our environment. His book about the creation of the Eden Project, ‘Eden’, first published in 2001 is the best-selling environment book of the century to date.
As part of our Active Environmentalism series of events, the NFU's Nick von Westenholz joined us to discuss Environmental Land Management on Wednesday 17 February 2021.
In England 69% of our landscape is farmed, under the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme, farmers will be paid for work that enhances the environment, such as tree or hedge planting, river management to mitigate flooding, or creating or restoring habitats for wildlife. Farmers will therefore be at the forefront of reversing environmental declines and tackling climate change as they reshape the future of farming in the 21st century.
Recorded on Wednesday 27 January 2021.
Online conversation with writer and conservationist Isabella Tree who spoke with the travel writer and novelist Philip Marsden about her pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex.
Isabella Tree is an award-winning author and travel writer. She had published five non-fiction books and writes for publications such as National Geographic, Granta, The Sunday Times and The Observer. Her articles have been selected for The Best American Travel Writing and Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Non-Fiction, and she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writer Awards. Her latest book Wilding – the Return of Nature to a British Farm, charts the story of the pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex where she lives with her husband Charlie Burrell.
Recorded on Wednesday 13 January 2021 - as part of our 'Active Environmentalism' series of talks and exhibitions.
Online conversation with Olly Steeds on his mission to genome the ocean. Oliver is Chief Executive and Mission Director of Nekton - a not-for-profit, charitable research foundation established to accelerate the scientific exploration and protection of the ocean.
Prior to Nekton, Oliver was a critically acclaimed investigative journalist including with NBC, ABC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, Discovery Channels. Depending on who you are ask, Oliver is either a ‘leading ocean explorer’ (Economist) or ‘part Captain Nemo, part Steve Zissou’ (Telegraph). By his own admission, he is not a very good submersible pilot. Oliver is also co-founder of the educational non-profit, Encounter EDU and the Ocean’s Academy.r a conversation with Olly Steeds on his mission to genome the ocean.
Recorded Wednesday 20 January 2021 as part of the Active Environmentalism series of online talks and exhibitions at Messums Wiltshire. Introduced by Johnny Messum.
Ben Goldsmith, who owns a 300-acre farm, near Bruton in Somerset, plans to transform it into a wild habitat within the next four years. He says, “We want to achieve the kind of species-rich, shape-shifting scrubby wood pasture environment that once blanketed much of western Britain.” Working with a wildlife ecologist, Ben has encouraged wetlands along the River Frome, wild flowers and native species including water voles, beavers and glow-worms – which used to be a feature of long summer evenings.
Ben Goldsmith is chair of the Conservative Environmental Network and is on the Board of DEFRA. Ben chairs the Goldsmith family’s philanthropic foundation, the JMG Foundation, which has a focus on the environment. Ben is also a Trustee of one of the UK’s largest philanthropic foundations, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. In 2003 Ben co-founded the UK Environmental Funders’ Network.