Art Pod

We talk to artist Joy Gregory at The Exchange and her London studio about her series of portraits featured in Creative Connections Cornwall, the experience working with the students of Mounts Bay Academy to curate the exhibition and what's next on the cards for her. Creative Connections Cornwall is a project about people and place in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, and Mounts Bay Academy in Penzance. The project connects young people from Cornwall with the award-winning Gregory, to explore the National Portrait Gallery's Collection.Presented by Programme Curator, Cat Gibbard, recorded and edited by Digital Producer, Megan Isaaks. 

Meet some of the WILD dads, curators behind Simple Truths, an Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme Exhibition. During the spring and summer of 2021, the WILD Young Parents Project allotment shed became a makeshift studio space, it's walls covered with photocopies of artworks selected from Arts Council Collection catalogues. At the start of each of their one-to-one sessions with WILD Dads Workers, the dads would choose a piece of art that resonated with them in that moment, marking their choice with a sticky note and a brief comment. As the weeks went on an impressive body of work began to form, which was discussed and refined, finally settling on a mixture of sculpture, paintings and photographs by: David Batchelor / Maeve Brennan / Shezad Dawood / Laura Ford / Gerard Hemsworth / Dan Holdsworth / John Issacs / Charlie Meecham / Aleksandra Mir / John Monks / Ryan Mosely / Seamus Nicolson / Richard Patterson / Liv Preston / Bob Robinson / Caroline Walker / Bedwyr WilliamsSimple Truths was part of our New Voices Programme, which gave a platform to members of our community not often heard, through the curation of works selected from the Arts Council Collection. Presented by Programme Curator, Cat Gibbard, recorded and edited by Digital Producer, Megan Isaaks.                                                                      

Artist Ore Ahmeed talks to Emilie Swann about Isolation Demoralisation a body of work created during the first national lockdown in spring 2020.Isolation Demoralisation is a colourful exploration of the effects of isolation during lockdown. Ahmeed's work was featured in Signs Of The Times; an outdoor billboard exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery presenting works by artists from around the UK responding to this time, whilst also offering us inspiration, hope and change.

ART POD is an occasional series of recorded interviews with artists, curators and other creatives working with Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange.First up is artist Gavin Jantjes, who speaks directly to the young curators of the 2020 exhibition Go On Being So at Newlyn Art Gallery, which included his work Freedom Hunters.Go On Being So was curated by the MBA Collective, a group of art, photography and graphics students from Mounts Bay Academy aged between 12 and 16 years. An incidental conversation between the 14 students around what it means to be a global citizen was the starting point for their exploration of the Arts Council Collection, bringing together an intriguing selection of works that said something about the world today and their place in it. Gavin Jantjes was born in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa in 1948. In 1976 he briefly moved to London and worked with the Poster Collective, a politically motivated group producing posters and banners in response to the miners' strike and conflicts in Vietnam and Ireland. Jantjes' A South African Colouring Book, a set of anti-apartheid screen prints, was exhibited at the ICA in London. His exhibition coincided with the infamous 1976 Soweto Uprising in which students between the ages of 10 to 17 protested against the implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction for their lessons rather than the students' home languages. An estimated 20,000 young people took part nationwide. They were met with fierce police brutality. Jantjes editioned Freedom Hunters a year later in Hamburg, Germany where he then lived. He describes the political works he produced at this time as “A need to cry rage, yet simultaneously I wanted a voice that could sing a visual song for and of Black people.”

The podcast you're about to listen to is a conversation between artists Young In Hong and Michelle Williams Gamaker, who both had work in Newlyn Art Gallery's 2020 exhibition Go On Being So. The work was selected from the Arts Council Collection by The MBA Collective, a group of art, photography and graphics students from Mounts Bay Academy.