Search

Menu

Close

Close X
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: 10am - 5pm
Wednesday: 10am - 5pm
Thursday: 10am - 5pm
Friday: 10am - 5pm
Saturday: 10am - 5pm
Sunday: 11am - 5pm
Painting of a table laden with food and drink and elaborate crockery including a lobster, a shell, fruit and goblets. All are painted with a technique that makes the whole thing seem as if the paint is dripping away.

Symposium | The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain

Find out more information about the symposium 27 to 28 September 2024 below including the latest updates on speakers and talks, how to get here and where to stay.

Schedule

Friday 27 September

17.00 – 18.20     Registration and private view of the exhibition

18.20 – 18.35     Director’s welcome

18.35 – 19.30     Keynote lecture, Phoebe Cummings, ‘For flowers too, are mirrors’

19.30 – 20.30    Drinks reception

Gallery space - the first room of The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain. Two vases stand on plinths surrounded by paintings on the walls.

Saturday 28 September

Schedule AM

9.30 – 10.00

Registration and coffee on arrival

 

10.00 – 10.45

Miriam O’Connor Perks & Melanie Vandenbrouck (Pallant House Gallery), ‘Is still life really still? It certainly isn’t silent’

 

10.45 – 11.00

Break

 

11.00 – 12.30

Still Life: Looking to the Past, into the Present, moderated by Yates Norton, Roberts Institute of Art

– Mat Collishaw (artist), Echoes of Mortality: Still Life’s Timeless Mirror on Modern Decay

– Dr. Ben Politt (UCL) and Dr Janelle G Evans (The University of Melbourne), The Emu and the Ornithologist: A Cross-Cultural Discussion on Painting Birds

– Gordon Cheung (artist), Tulipmaniac

Schedule PM

12.30 – 14.30

Lunch and viewing of the exhibitions

 

14.30 – 16.00

Forging a path, forging identity, moderated by Miriam O’Connor Perks, Pallant House Gallery

– Hemdat Kislev (University of St Andrews), Still Life, Abstraction and Free Expression in the Late Works of Jessica Dismorr

– Naomi Polonsky (Kettle’s Yard), Gender and genre: women artists and still life in the 21st century

– Dr. Patricia Hardy (Gainsborough House), Revealing Nature: the Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines

 

16.00 – 16.15

Break

 

16.15 – 17.15

In conversation: Clare Woods and Glenn Brown, moderated by Simon Martin, Pallant House Gallery

Abstracts

Friday 27 September

18.35 – 19.30

Keynote lecture, Phoebe Cummings, ‘For flowers too, are mirrors’

How can contemporary sculpture question and extend the still life genre?  How might the traditional themes associated with still life manifest in unexpected forms and media? What is the significance of stillness in relation to the restlessness of ephemeral sculpture and its images?  Phoebe Cummings will discuss key ideas at play in her installation I hear myself with my throat, commissioned as part of the exhibition The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain. This paper explores how time, existence, flowers and the body are all part of the friction active in her intensive constructions of raw material.

 

Saturday 28 September

10.00 – 10.45

Miriam O’Connor Perks & Melanie Vandenbrouck (Pallant House Gallery), ‘Is still life really still? It certainly isn’t silent’

In this lecture, ‘The Shape of Things’ curators O’Connor Perks and Melanie Vandenbrouck provide an insight into the concepts behind the exhibition, and its development. They will delve into the ways in which still life has been used by artists, from 1900 to the present, to reflect on the society in which they live and to grapple with some of the most profound themes of the human condition: love and loss; life and death; beauty and decay. Some of today’s artists look back to art history to address issues of global significance, such as the legacy of empire, conflicts and the climate crisis. They will explore how, throughout its history, the genre has benefitted from the mobility of artists and ideas, whilst also providing the fuel for artistic experimentation.

 

11.00 – 12.30   

Still Life: Looking to the Past, into the Present, moderated by Yates Norton, Roberts Institute of Art

Mat Collishaw (artist), Echoes of Mortality: Still Life’s Timeless Mirror on Modern Decay

Throughout his 30-year career, Collishaw has contemplated the nature of the human subconscious and explored ways to influence it through various media. Through optical illusions, paintings, projections and moving sculptures, the artist creates works and scenarios that directly and unconsciously engage their viewers. The works encourage us to think about fundamental questions of psychology, history, sociology and science. Behind the richness and visual appeal of each work there is a deep exploration of how we perceive and are influenced by the world today through images, and modern technology. Questions regarding behavioural manipulation, programming, temporal reality all linger in the viewing experience.

Dr Ben Politt (UCL) and Dr Janelle G Evans (The University of Melbourne), The Emu and the Ornithologist: A Cross-Cultural Discussion on Painting Birds

This paper, presented by two speakers, a British art historian and an Australian artist, takes a cross-cultural approach in reading Ramsay Richard Reinagle’s An Ornithologist, Possibly John Latham (1802).

Reinagle’s portrait documents the postmortem treatment of birds for scientific purposes. The figure shown is surrounded by avian specimens, as well as a bird painting and a copy of a book by John Latham. Latham published two foundational texts, the Index Ornithologicus (1790) and The General Synopsis of Birds (1781–1785) to which he added supplementary volumes, the second of which, published in 1801 or 1802, included entries on many hitherto unknown Australian birds. Latham’s second supplement offers the first published account of the lyrebird (menura novaehollandiae), shown hanging on the wall in the background.

Latham was a significant figure in the history of colonial Australia, sitting at the interstices of collecting, the collected, and the collection. A crucial aspect of his practise, as illustrated in the published image of the lyrebird, was the dissemination of ornithological information through the commissioning of the production of engravings, or gravings as they were then also known, a term that hints at the deathly character of all visual representation.

The dead birds in the painting, as in Latham’s books, are not only still, they are also stolen. Jacques Derrida notes how, to ensure the possibility of memorialization and repetition, the archive must be an ‘external place’ of consignation. The archived object must be extracted from its setting. The external place shown in Reinagle’s painting will form the leitmotif of this discussion.

An Ornithologist was produced at a critical moment in the history of colonial Australia, when the country’s coastline was being charted by both French and British explorers. The collecting and cataloguing of the territory’s natural history was part of this imperial project. The epistemic fixing of Terra Australis Incognita that is celebrated in the painting is here critiqued with reference to the works of the Dharug artist, Janelle Evans. Her ongoing series, Incarceration Nation (2006–), draws deeply on the avian imaginary, the bird as cultural conduit, particularly the male emu, a figure that, as this paper will ultimately explore, stands up for a different episteme, a different place of consignation.

Gordon Cheung (artist), Tulipmaniac

Gordon Cheung will talk about his work inspired from the Dutch Golden Age, considered the birth of modern capitalism, and Tulipmania—the first recorded economic bubble, where tulip prices soared to the value of a house. Inspired by the 2008 global financial crisis, Cheung uses tulips from this era as a motif to merge historical events with modern technologies like AI, 3D printing, and digital art tools. By reimagining the still life genre in the digital age, Cheung aims to weave together history, geopolitics, and disruptive technologies to create reflective spaces that explore the transience of life and the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations.

 

14.30 – 16.00

Forging a path, forging identity, moderated by Miriam O’Connor Perks, Pallant House Gallery

Hemdat Kislev (University of St Andrews), Still Life, Abstraction and Free Expression in the Late Works of Jessica Dismorr

In 1935, a change occurred in Jessica Dismorr’s paintings. After the Vorticists disbanded, Dismorr abandoned abstraction and focused on portraits, interior scenes, and images of popular culture throughout the twenties and early thirties. However, around 1935, Dismorr changed her style again and began painting in two seemingly opposing modes – still life and abstraction. Furthermore, her biomorphic abstract compositions echoed the shapes and positioning of the objects populating her still life. The concurrent production of still life and abstract works, and their formal affinities, imply that they were conceptually related in her practice. This is evident in the still life Vase on a Table (1937), where superimposed objects– a vase over a jug, jug over a curtain, a curtain over cloth, cloth over a table, and table over a rug –flatten the surface and create a layover effect very similar to the treatment of space and transparencies in the abstract work Superimposed Forms (1938).

This stylistic change occurred while Dismorr became involved with political exhibitions and debates about the politics of artistic styles, indicating that her choice to paint still life and abstraction was politically informed. Recently, several studies, such as those by Alicia Foster and Katy Deepwell, noted that Dismorr’s return to abstraction was informed by a concern with politics in general, and with democratic freedom specifically. Catherine Heathcook observed that Dismorr’s return to abstraction was related to a wider concern with freedom of expression and its dependence on democratic values. However, these studies don’t account for the connection between still life and her late abstract works, and their relation to the political significance of artistic freedom.

This presentation will show that Dismorr’s artistic activities in the mid-thirties relate to an interpretation of free modern art as a form of artistic free speech in the interwar period. Artistic freedom was especially important for someone like Dismorr, a woman and a modernist, who likely experienced the political turmoil of the mid-thirties as a regressive return to the hostility against Vorticists and suffragists that she encountered in the 1910s. I will argue that her return to abstraction via still life was a way to maintain art’s political function by upholding its artistic freedom. Her stylistic change, her views on representation, her position as a woman artist, and her involvement in political exhibitions should be seen as related and influenced by her belief that free art is necessary for free expression.

Naomi Polonsky (Kettle’s Yard), Gender and genre: women artists and still life in the 21st century

Throughout the history of Western art, still life has been dismissed as a minor subject, largely because of its associations with women and the home. In the 17th century, alongside the resurgence of the genre during the Dutch Golden Age, the French Academy of Fine Arts enshrined the denigration of still life through its ‘hierarchy of genres’. Women artists’ exclusion from the life drawing room and attendant preclusion from working in the ‘high genres’ which featured representations of the human body, created a double bind whereby they were restricted to painting in the ‘low genre’ of still life and automatically dismissed for it. The fact that the French word genre denotes both genre and gender shows how intimately the two were intertwined.

Paradoxically, due to the prosaic nature of its subject matter, still life is the ideal genre for artistic experimentation – by both male and female artists. Still life has been the site of radical experiments with form and meaning and a way for artists to explore questions about life, death, gender and the self. Many artists contend with the tensions at the heart of the genre: between the private and public, nature and culture, stillness and movement.

In a time of greater freedom and opportunity for women artists, what is the role of gender in still life now? This paper will explore the work of contemporary women artists in Britain using the genre of still life, including Sam Taylor-Johnson, Katy Stubbs, Maisie Cousins, Joy Labinjo, Anna Liber Lewis and Sekai Machache. It will explore how these artists engage with the gendered history of still life, while also commenting on pressing current issues including climate change, the pandemic and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It will discuss the way in which the artists’ social and material conditions continue to determine their use of still life as a subject.

It will then argue that these artists’ valorisation of style is itself a rejection of the mimetic principle, or what art historian Norman Bryson calls the ‘Essential Copy’, upon which the historic ‘hierarchy of genres’ is premised. Their stylised use of this subject matter serves to expose the essential paradox underlying conceptions of still life as a ‘lowly’ genre: if the primary artistic goal is the illusion of reality, how can artists produce works of merit which depict objects which are inherently of no merit? In this way, still life becomes a metaphor for the paradoxical way in which the hierarchy of gender has historically been conceived.

Dr Patricia Hardy (Gainsborough House), Revealing Nature: the Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines

Cedric Morris (1889-1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (known as Lett) (1894-1978) formed a unique partnership in art and in love for over sixty years from the time they met on Armistice Night, 1918.

Morris is the more recognised artist due to the popularity of his still lives and flower paintings, while Lett’s reputation suffered due to his negligible output between 1934-50 but is being reassessed as an important strand of British Surrealism. They lived primarily in Suffolk at the Pound then Benton End, Hadleigh after absorbing the European modernist influences in France in the 1920s. They also founded an art school, The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, which was celebrated for its informal teaching methods set within a traditional structure of life classes, established from 1940 at Benton End. While Lett focused on managing the school Morris combined a prolific artistic output with a passion for horticulture, breeding irises on a commercial scale Here they appeared to live openly as a homosexual couple with a large social network and successful school.

This paper explores the artworks created by Morris which used the garden as its central motif. Rejecting the modernist direction of the Seven and Five Society and London Group Morris settled into a style which conveyed an emotional connection with the natural world around him. Born in Wales Morris cited his Welsh identity as a point of difference with the English as well as his dislike of the formal art world structures of exhibition and dealership current in London causing him to migrate to Suffolk. These feelings together with his homosexuality and lack of formal art training have been cited as significant in his choice of subject matter.  The extent to which Morris did in fact subvert a traditional view of still life viewed as domestic to extend the genre and to create a version of protest paintings is a central theme of this paper.

 

16.15 – 17.15

In conversation: Clare Woods and Glenn Brown, moderated by Simon Martin

Speakers

Photograph of a man standing wearing a grey blazer, white shirt and orange pocket square - can only be seen from waist up. He has a short grey bread and moustache. Greyscale image.

Glenn Brown

Artist

Glenn Brown’s (b. 1966) practice is one in which concerns of a technical, aesthetic, and spiritual nature are explored through an eclectic mix of influences. His works draw on Old Masters like Rembrandt, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, and sci-fi artists like Chris Foss. Manipulating these sources beyond recognition, Brown creates uncanny forms and colours. Notable solo exhibitions include the Serpentine Gallery (2004), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2008), and Tate Liverpool (2009-10). In 2022, he founded The Brown Collection in London, showcasing his works alongside contemporary and historical pieces.

Headshot of a man looking to the right wearing glasses. Greyscale image.

Gordon Cheung

Artist

Gordon Cheung’s still life paintings and glitch works explore the impact of globalization, capitalism, and technology on contemporary society. His still life paintings, rooted in the vanitas tradition, use financial newspaper pages as canvases, blending symbols of mortality with modern economic data to comment on the transient nature of wealth and power. In contrast, his glitch works employ digital distortions to symbolize the fragility of our digital existence and question the trust we place in technology. Both series critique the underlying structures of power and control in the modern world, highlighting the instability and impermanence of life in both the physical and digital realms.

Photograph in greyscale of man with grandad collar striped shirt from chest up. He has short dark hair and stubble.

Mat Collishaw

Artist

Mat Collishaw is one of the most significant and compelling artists in contemporary British art. A founding member of the Young British Artists, he participated in the seminal Freeze exhibition (1988) and Sensation (1997). Over his 30-year career, Collishaw has explored the human subconscious through optical illusions, paintings, and moving sculptures. His work investigates psychology, history, and technology, asking how we are influenced by images and modern media. With visual allure, his pieces invite reflection on perception, behaviour, and the nature of reality.

Photograph of a woman with shoulder length hair sitting with her head resting on her right fist. Greyscale image.

Phoebe Cummings

Artist

Phoebe Cummings studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton and earned her MA in Ceramics & Glass from the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has completed residencies in the UK, USA, and Greenland, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Camden Art Centre. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, and Princeton Art Museum. Cummings won the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011 and the inaugural BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize in 2017. She is a Research Associate at the University of Westminster’s Ceramics Research Centre.

Greyscale photograph of a woman with short hair, wearing a scarf with trees in the background

Janelle Evans

Artist, writer and curator, University of Melbourne

Dr Janelle Evans is a descendant of the Dharug peoples of Western Sydney. She is an exhibiting artist, writer and curator with a multi-disciplinary drawing, painting and media practice. She exhibits nationally and internationally, and her works are held in private and public collections.

Janelle is Head, Master of Contemporary Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her current research interests focus on early colonial representations of first contact encounters in art and print media, with a particular emphasis on Romantic and Gothic genres. Her secondary interests include the History of the Book and early modern printmaking in London.

Dr. Patricia Hardy

Curator, Keeper of Art & Place, Gainsborough’s House

Pat Hardy is an experienced curator, having worked as a curator at the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of London for many years. She is the exhibition curator of Revealing Nature: the Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines at Gainsborough’s House 6 July-3 November 2024 where she is currently Curator. She has also edited and written an essay in the accompanying exhibition publication.

Hemdat Kislev

Doctoral Candidate, University of St Andrews

Hemdat Kislev is a doctoral candidate in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. Her research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She studies the political interpretations of aesthetic autonomy by modernists in interwar Britain and Mandatory Palestine. Her interests include the history of aesthetics, the interwar period, British modernism, and modernism in the Middle East.

Greyscale photograph of a man leaning on a wall to his left. He wears a dark blazer and white shirt and has short hair and a moustache.

Simon Martin

Director, Pallant House Gallery

Simon Martin is a curator, writer, and Director of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, one of the leading regional modern art museums in the UK. He is a Trustee of the Artist Collecting Society and serves on the Courtauld Association Committee and the Fabric Advisory Committee of Chichester Cathedral. He has curated and commissioned numerous exhibitions at the Gallery, and written and contributed to a wide range of books and publications on modern and contemporary British art.

Photograph of a woman wearing a ink jumper and blue jeans with long curly brown hair stood in front of an artwork hung on a white wall. It shows an abstract head made up of many different coloured shapes. Greyscale image.

Miriam O'Connor Perks

Curator, Pallant House Gallery

Miriam O’Connor Perks completed her Master’s in art history and museum Curating at the University of Sussex in 2018. She worked at Towner Eastbourne before joining Pallant House Gallery in 2021. She leads on artists’ commissions at the Gallery and has a particular interest in post-war and contemporary British art.

Headshot photograph of a man with short brown hair and stubble wearing a blue shirt. Greyscale image.

Ben Politt

Associate Lecturer, UCL and The Courtauld Institute of Art

Ben Pollitt is an associate lecturer at UCL and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2020. He has undertaken a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre and a Caird Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum. His current research project, ‘The Floating Feather: A European-Australian Dialogue on the Visual Presentation of Air,’ has received a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. His work has been published in The Art Bulletin and Third Text and will feature in the forthcoming issue of Res. Ben is the co-editor of the ‘Decolonial Imaginaire’ forum for Third Text.

Photograph of a woman from chest up with shoulder length brown hair and wearing a white tshirt on a green background. Greyscale image.

Naomi Polonsky

Assistant Curator, Kettle’s Yard

Naomi Polonsky is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is currently Assistant Curator (House & Collection) at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, focusing on the care of the house, collection, and archive. Previously, she was Associate Curator at The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, where she curated Life is Still Life in 2022. Polonsky has taught art history at the University of Cambridge and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and Hyperallergic. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute and a BA in Modern Languages from Oxford University.

Photograph of a woman with short grey white hair, leaning against a wall looking left. She wears a blue denim dress and has her hands clasped in front of her. Greyscale image.

Melanie Vandenbrouck

Chief Curator, Pallant House Gallery

Melanie Vandenbrouck is a curator, writer and art historian, and the Chief Curator at Pallant House Gallery. Prior to joining the Gallery, she worked at the V&A and Royal Museums Greenwich in London, and guest-curated internationally. She trained at the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne University in Paris, Sussex University and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Photograph of a woman with long light hair falling past shoulders wearing a black top. In the background you can see shelves. Greyscale image.

Clare Woods

Artist

Clare Woods (b. 1972, Southampton) is a British artist known for her paintings, collages, and prints, drawing on her background in sculpture. Her work explores still life, interiors, and portraiture, reinterpreting found imagery to blur the line between the familiar and uncanny. Printmaking has become central to her practice, with a dedicated print room in her studio. Woods has exhibited widely, with major shows at The Hepworth Wakefield (2011), Cristea Roberts Gallery (2024), and CCA Museum, Mallorca (2023). Elected as a Royal Academician in 2022, her works are held in numerous public collections worldwide. She lives and works in Hereford.

Accommodation in Chichester

Cherry End Bed and Breakfast, 3 Clydesdale Avenue, Chichester, PO19 7PW

Chichester Cathedral 4 Canon Lane, Chichester

Chichester Inn, 38 West Street, Chichester, PO19 1RP

East Walls Hotel, 3 East Row, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 1PD

Harbour Hotel, 57 North Street, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 1NH

OYO George and Dragon Inn, 51 North Street, Chichester

Premier Inn, Chichester Gate Leisure Park, Terminus Road, Chichester, PO19 8EL

Purchases, 31 North Street, Chichester, PO19 1LX

The Vestry, Southgate, Chichester, PO19 1ES

Travelodge Chichester Central, Chapel Street, Chichester, PO19 1DL

Trents Greene King Inns, 50 South Street, Chichester, PO19 1DS

Two stone sculptures of birds resembling a cross between and ostrich and a dodo stand on a plinth in front of a red brick building
We use cookies to improve your experience of using our website. View our Cookies Policy.
Accept and close