Studio 3 Gallery at the School of Arts is pleased to announce their first in-person exhibition, Are You Local?. The exhibition is a collaboration between MA Curating students at the School of Arts. The exhibition will be open to the public from 11am – 2pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday until Friday 2 July, booking required via this QR code.
The exhibition will include a wide-ranging collection of artworks, crafts, photographs and texts to explore the question of locality and its impact on the county’s inhabitants. Works by artists including Claudia Clare, Hamish Fulton, Humphrey Ocean and Steve Macpherson will be exhibited alongside historic pilgrim badges, postcards and Huguenot silk.
The exhibition examines the personal – stories of migration, identity and belonging; the geographical – examples of communication, journey and location; and the cultural – the impact of place on the development of culture and language.
Excitingly, the exhibition includes a first showing for Claudia Clare’s new ceramic piece Rebuilding the Dream. It follows the story of Hossein, a Kurdish refugee who having left his home in Iran came to England hoping to create a new one. The surface portrays his ideas of how he had to adapt to a different country to his expectations, resulting in rebuilding a dream that would be his new life. The pot, standing at approximately 60cm tall and having been broken and pieced back together, illustrates his journey in England on the outside, with hidden illustrations showing through the gaps to within.
Programme Director, Dr Ben Thomas shares, ‘The story of travel, migration and belonging in Kent is the most relevant exhibition to be held this year. The cultural enrichment of the county can be traced back hundreds of years and echoes down the centuries within the breadth of this exhibition. It is such a pleasure to have succeeded in exhibiting these exciting artworks after the many constraints our curators have encountered during the pandemic’.
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If you would like to attend, you can book via this link or the QR code.
IMAGE CREDIT: Rebuilding the Dream by Claudia Clare