Art and Archives Event Series with The National Archives
16 - 18 November 2021, online
Art360 Foundation and The National Archives hosted a series of three connected workshops from Tuesday 16 to Thursday 18 November 2021, exploring how creative practitioners have historically interacted with institutional and artists’ archives, and how they might engage with such spaces in future. Our aim was to open a dialogue with the creative community in order to understand and address the opportunities present in the archive for creative practice and the barriers preventing artists’ engagement.
These workshops also considered how artists approach the creation of their own archives, and look to share ways that archivists have worked with artists through the Art360 Programme.
Archives as Creative Practice
Our first workshop, Archives as Creative Practice, explored different approaches to creating archives, how elements of artists’ practice can be archived and how artists’ archives differ from, or share affinities with, institution-based archives and other archival sites and structures with speakers Jenny Bunn (The National Archives), Ellie Porter (Art360) and Franklyn Rodgers (Artist). Rodgers participated in the first Art360 programme.
Creative Encounters with Archives
Our second workshop, Creative Encounters with Archives, invited participating artists Max Colson, Julia Ingle, Rashi Rajguru and Nina Wakeford, to share their experiences of engaging with the structures and selected objects from The National Archives’ collections. The Visual Collections team at The National Archives shared their learnings from the project. Together, they then explored how a wider and more dynamic creative engagement with archives can be facilitated.
Our third and final workshop, Art and Archives: A Deep Dive, encouraged a deeper exploration of the themes covered in our first two events, and involved active participation from those attending. Participants discussed their takeaways from the workshops and the possible frameworks for collaborative working between arts organisations, artists and audiences that can be utilised more widely.
This event series was supported by the Friends of The National Archives.