Festus is an annual festival of ambitious & experimental collaborative projects between RCA Sculpture students and external partners.

Festus

This project is a collaboration between the new Wandsworth gallery space The Steam Room, run by WiP Projects and curated by Kirsten Cooke,  artist/curator duo Hot Desque and Tutor Melanie Jackson. Participants will have chance to make a group exhibition in the space after a series of talks, seminars and making workshops.

Model Village plays with ideas of scale, the model as maquette and the model as a ‘virtual’ space in which to project unknown/new/speculative realities– suggesting worlds and potentials far beyond their physical manifestation. These propositions for alternative exhibitions play with perspective, material and illusion. Models and maquettes offer up spaces of potential. Caught in limbo, they exist in physical space, but can also be imagined as more than they appear. Maquettes ask you to alter your perceptions of scale and perspective, to make yourself smaller in order to explore these potential happenings, or enlarge what is in front of you so that you may walk into it just as you are. Each unique model, with its artwork housed within, will have its own story to tell.  

Model Village will invite half the artists to create larger models or infrastructures or sculptures as miniature exhibition spaces for artwork by the remaining artists to be placed. We will supply materials and space for model and experiments and at the end of the week there will be a crit and a private view followed by a weekend exhibition. 

Everything I do is intended to be big, and, while I’m working on the models, for me they are life-size. When I take one in my hand like this, I am seeing and feeling it as life-size ... So in my mind there’s never any change of scale at all. 

“Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things, a nation that doesn’t live,”

Hot Desque is a partnership between artists Lizzy Drury and Neena Percy. Hot Desque’s work spans site-specific installations, set and prop design, film, writing, publications and workshops.Their research-led practice plays with the tropes of staging and lighting to create a theatrical mise-en-scène through collaborations with other artists. Interested in sci-fi world-building and deep ecology, they explore the potential to re-enchant matter and inanimate objects through dissolving the hierarchical classification of things. Their first iteration of Model Village took place as part of their artist residency at The Swiss Church in London, 2020.

Curator of Steam Room, Kirsten Cooke will introduce her curatorial practice and lead a crit for artists in the show.

Cooke’s research explores the way in which curating mediates and stages how we ‘know’, looking at exhibition environments to explore the space of infrastructure and queer ecologies. Her practice situates curating alongside and in tension with artists through conversations that are rendered tangible in physical exhibition architectures.

Tuesday 13/02/24 Site visit to the Steam Room – 

AM seminar by Melanie Jackson followed by 

PM trip to scrap scheme for additional materials. https://www.workandplayscrapstore.org.uk/

Friday 15/02/24 everyone taking part to arrive by 10am with finished work for install at 2pm with curator Kirsten Cooke public opening from 5pm Open 16th and 17th take down 5pm Sunday evening.

Students must be available for the weekday sessions and for a rota of invigilation during the weekend opening

https://post.moma.org/kingelez-visionnaire/?_ga=2.47216293.363256741.1692777026-1770543722.1692777026

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/rachel-wells-scale-at-any-size-henry-moore-and-scaling-up-r1151302

https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/stettheimer-dollhouse-0

The Stettheimer Dollhouse, a lavish, highly-detailed dollhouse with rarely seen miniature 20th-century modernist artworks. Carrie Stettheimer, along with her sisters Ettie and Florine and their mother Rosetta, was the host of an influential avant-garde artistic salon in early 20th century New York. The sisters, who were also known as the “Stetties,” weaved together the fashion and style of early 20th century New York in miniature form across 12 rooms, from the Limoges vases in the chintz bedroom to the crystal-trimmed candelabra in the salon. In fact, some of the leading figures of modern art in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, including Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Margaret and William Zorach, and others gifted miniature works for the dollhouse.

This festus project is a collaboration between the new Wandsworth gallery space The Steam Room, run by WiP Projects and artist/curator duo Hot Desque and Melanie Jackson @rcasculpture. Participants will have chance to make a group exhibition in the space after a series of talks, seminars and making workshops.

“Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things, a nation that doesn’t live,” 

Model Village

This is an opportunity to make and exhibit new artwork and research in response to the Sir John Soane’s Museum, an extraordinary (and problematic) collection of objects and images amassed by British preeminent 19th-century architect Sir John Soane. This Project will be led by Tutor Ben Judd.

The collection is on display at his large family home in central London; the museum consists of three adjoining townhouses which Soane converted into a single residence. His vast collection includes antiquities, furniture, sculptures, architectural models and drawings and paintings including work by Hogarth, Turner and Canaletto, as well as the spectacular sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh, Seti I. The objects and images are arranged in the museum in often very close proximity, giving the impression of a large cabinet of curiosities.

The Sir John Soane’s Museum is a display of status and wealth; the act of collecting and placing of objects within an alien environment is intrinsically linked to colonialism. As Jessica Dos Santos writes, “... Soane’s private collection recontextualises histories that go far beyond him, erasing their cultural contexts by anonymising the original artists and by extension any original purpose or meaning. Museums provide a selective narrative, with the liberty to rewrite and reframe these artworks to fit with Western ideals.”

Introduction including a tour of the museum and curator’s talk

Development of work in the museum’s art room

Development of work in the museum’s art room and presentations in the museum’s seminar

• Sir John Soane’s Museum: https://www.soane.org/about/our-history

• Jens Brockmeier, Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical

• Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art: The Archive

• Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Art Gallery, London

Sir John Soane’s Museum

QUEER ENOUGH is a project led by Whiskey Chow that delves into the contemporary landscape of queer art, questioning whether we have moved beyond the era where queer art was primarily associated with LGBTQ+ visibility and representation. Against the backdrop of the commodification of queer code in the arts and cultural industry, algorithmic influences, social voyeurism, and the pursuit of social media approval, the project aims to explore nowadays how queer artists navigate societal norms, various gazes, indifference, hegemony, and consumerism while creating space for queer resilience and sensitivity.

Evolution of Queer Art: Have we surpassed the era where queer art was primarily centred around LGBTQ+ visibility and representation?

Negotiating Norms and Gazes: How do queer artists navigate norms, social gazes (within and beyond LGBTQ+ communities), social media likes, indifference, hegemony, and consumerism in their art-making process?

Defining "Queer Enough": What does "queer enough" mean in the 21st century, considering diverse timelines and territories?

Measurement of Queerness: If defining "queer" is a complex and probably the least queer task, how can we establish a measurement for what is "queer enough"?

Maintaining Radicalness: If the need for measurement is to be abandoned, how can we maintain the radicalness of the queer lens in the work we are making, the ways we are seeing, the things we are talking and the ways we are living?

The project encourages participants to join the exploration with Whiskey Chow, offering a space for those with critical curiosity and strong commitment. Artists are invited to respond to these questions through their artmaking, contributing to the ongoing dialogue around queerness in arts in the 21st century.

"QUEER ENOUGH" serves as both the project name and exhibition title, reflecting the provocative and challenging nature of the exploration. The title signifies that the topic is complex, daring, and too hot to handle.

Participants are welcome to engage in the project, contributing their perspectives, experiences, and expressions to the exploration of what it means to be "QUEER ENOUGH" in the contemporary world, as well as rethinking what is “not queer enough”. This is an invitation to question, challenge, exchange and redefine queer narratives in ways that resonate with their unique voices and experiences.

7 February 2024  afternoon  QUEER ENOUGH first group meeting @RCA Battersea

13 - 15 February 2024 Three days of activities at internal and external locations, to be announced. Potential activities including: 

Site/ exhibition visit: Bermondsey Project Space, Queercircle, Bishopsgate Institute, Queer Britain, the Feminist Library and more!

Exhibition making workshop led by Andrew Etherington, Director at Bermondsey Project Space

Curator & artist talk, historial tour, more to be announced but by signing up, you are committed to engage to the full extent!

15 - 19 April 2024 QUEER ENOUGH exhibition at Bermondsey Project Space

(a little reference to last year’s exhibition at Bermondsey Project Space, curated by Whiskey Chow: https://project-space.london/soft-and-hard)

Queer Enough

The Royal College of Art's Sculpture School is excited to announce an innovative collaboration with 'LIFT', a premier movement, balance, and strength studio located in Shoreditch, East London. Titled 'SCULPT', this project invites 15 students to engage in an interdisciplinary research exercise of physical engagement, embodied performance, and sculptural enquiry with Tutor Graham Hudson.

As LIFT explains, 'Increasingly sedentary lifestyles and a common lack of understanding around the body’s mechanics have led to an epidemic of restricted mobility and suboptimal performance. The negative impact that this has on our bodies’ natural fluid and dynamic movements not only affects our performance in the training space, but most importantly, how we feel in our bodies every single day.' Their approach aligns with our ethos at the Sculpture School, where we value diverse and experimental methods in creating and experiencing what art can be, where process is given higher value than outcome, and where critical reflection in the use of our bodies as agents of sculpture is paramount.

Participating students will attend three bespoke classes at LIFT, specifically designed for them. Requiring no prior experience, these classes will take place in January and February 2024. They are crafted to enhance our understanding of biomechanics and our sense of being in space and time, breathing, moving, sensing. These are concepts that are integral to both physical training and art making.

During January, students are required to propose a moving image work inspired by the project concept and classes. Instead of creating 15 individual works, they will collaboratively produce a body of work consisting of 15 chapters or scenes. We will discuss this outcome in seminars. The project will culminate in a special one-evening event at LIFT, where these works will be displayed, open to the public and guests.

S C U L P T

Artist Residency, Workshop & a Public Exhibition and PV at the Standpoint Gallery, London

There are many interpretations of the phase Sixth Sense. We are familiar with the five senses taste, smell, vision, hearing and touch, so what is the sixth sense? The medical profession says it’s proprioception, which allows us to keep track of where our body parts are in space, how are limbs are located. Without this, do we metaphorically fall apart? What about synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon where the stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a secondary sensory pathway?

Is the sixth sense the power of perception beyond the five other senses: intuition, hunch, clairvoyance, second sight, fear, haunting, divination & precognition, the gut feeling we experience as artists once our imagination takes hold of our making and thinking, and we instinctively know we are on the right path to something we didn’t know before, the thrill  of creating and doing?

Sixth Sense is the 6th collaborative Festus project taking place at the Standpoint Gallery in Hoxton, London led by Denise de Cordova, Kate Davis and Emma Benyon Kelly.  It is a  residency that culminates in an exhibition that will be open to the public later as part of the Standpoint art programme. There will be artist talks from the Standpoint community as well as invited guest speakers, workshops accessing the facilities at Standpoint which includes ceramics and direct printing, as well as the opportunity to create work within the space of the gallery and its education room. The intention is also to produce a collaborative work for the gallery’s public facing window space.

The residency is the focus of this Festus project, and it is important that students commit to this as much as possible. Residencies can be an important career path for artists, that provide temporary periods of time for an artist to work on a project or develop new ideas. They are time out of your usual work to develop new art and ideas where access to a shared studio or making environment provides mutual and practical support. 

The intention is for everyone to produce works in response to the phrase Sixth Sense and its broad interpretation to interrogate their practice and to encourage an open interpretive understanding of what this might mean. 

RCA alumni will be invited to be part of the discussions and/or workshops to build a supportive network across different year groups at RCA. Workshops, artist talks and surgeries will be timetabled during the residency.

Standpoint is a community of artist practitioners, with a well-established education, residency and exhibition programme, and home to the Mark Tanner Annual Sculpture Prize. We will be working closely with Emma Benyon Kelly, director and curator for Standpoint and the Mark Tanner Award.  

There will be access to Standpoint at weekends. 

Talks & Introduction Tuesday 13th & Wednesday 14th Feb

Workshops and surgeries will take place throughout the residency.

https://www.standpointlondon.co.uk/gallery/2021/together-it-seams/index.php https://standpointgallery.wixsite.com/prickandstitch 

https://artquest.org.uk/how-to-articles/artist-residencies/

@prickandstitch_rca is the Instagram account created for previous Sculpture Residencies at Standpoint. 

                     led by Denise de Cordova, Kate Davis and Emma Benyon Kelly