Output details

From Floor to Sky: British Sculpture and the Studio Experience

The exhibition was conceived and produced as a living case study of the influence of art schools on contemporary visual art. In the 1960s, Peter Kardia pioneered a new teaching method, which broke down traditional medium boundaries, freed education from the patriarchal apprentice model and instilled an entrepreneurial spirit that encouraged students to engage with society. The exhibition output that is submitted for assessment is a curatorial project that was initiated by Mazière, as curator of Ambika P3. While this was a collaborative project and the selection of artists was made by Peter Kardia, in consultation with Mazière and Roderick Coyne, Mazière led and delivered on the selection of artworks, fund-raising, and installation and design at the gallery. Artists included: Alison Wilding, Bill Woodrow, Boyd Webb, Richard Deacon, Richard Wentworth, amongst others.

Please see portfolio for further documentation of research dimensions.

This project is situated within curatorial and historical research and seeks to capture experimental practices in art school teaching in a key period of British visual culture, namely the late 1960s and early 1970s. Interest in this topic is growing, as evidenced by the Tate’s ‘Art School Educated Curriculum Development’ project and a number of publications such as Curating and the Educational Turn (O’Neill and Wilson), which have sought to account for art’s paradigmatic reorientation towards the educational. From Floor to Sky distinctively asks whether the role and influence of a significant art school teacher working during this period of radical reassessment can be made visible, and what curatorial methods are appropriate to the task. From Floor to Sky also questions how the development of an artist’s work reflects his or her training and influences. The curatorial strategy developed to create the exhibition centred on re-staging specific elements of Kardia’s method. Each artist contributed two pieces of work, one from the earliest period of their career and one contemporary piece. From the outset, boundaries were set (amount of space, schedule) but major decisions were also left to the artists. There was an additional requirement for each artist to make or show new work, which could take any form. By bringing together ex-students within the same environment for the first time, the research enabled new links between unrelated artists and their practices and revealed the nature of the pedagogic process in the development of their work. As a central tenet of the show was to recreate the open environment of the studio, alongside commissioning and producing work on site, the research also contributes innovative methods to curatorial practice concerned with collaborative working and the illumination of pedagogy in art school contexts.