Output details

Unto this Last - A commission to create a web-based work responding to the Ruskin School collection

Kippin was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art to research and creatively respond the Ruskin School’s teaching collection and catalogues assembled by John Ruskin for the School.

Through his research, Kippin created a body of site-specific artwork for the website of the Ruskin School. Supported by the AHRC, ‘The Elements of Drawing website provides a visual interface to Ruskin's Teaching Collection, uniting his catalogue, comments and instructions to his students with modern curatorial information about each object’. The Ruskin School commissioned six artists in total specifically for this resource.

Kippin’s work exists in four parts to reflect

Ruskins’ own numbered pedagogic collections. There is a sequence of photographic images that are accompanied by Ruskin’s own texts outlining his position on a number of the important political and cultural questions of his day. The texts were chosen because they resonate within our own time and they are presented together with an audio narrative provided by a young girl. ‘Unto this Last’ is a commentary on contemporary political and cultural values and much of its force derives from the contemporary resonance of the tensions between commercial and cultural imperatives. The intention is to create a discursive space in which current political concerns can be historically contextualised and re-viewed and contemplated within the light of contemporary experience. It is a commentary that is grounded in the philosophical position of the notion of ‘quality’ and uses an innovative format to reconsider the role of the artist in society whilst offering a new platform and range of associations from which to weigh the importance of Ruskin’s thinking. As a site-specific work, this commission is sited within the website alongside the other commissioned pieces by Tania Kovats, Robert Hewison, Philip Hoare, Jeremy Millar and Hadrian Pigott.