EDGELANDS
Each year we choose a general theme, from which the ideas and inspiration for the courses are drawn. This enables us to refresh our teaching constantly, providing different perspectives each year on the subjects and concepts studied.
It provides a common ground between all the full and part-time courses, generating a unity of thought and purpose throughout the work done in the School.
From the park to the city, oil pastel on board, Phil Archer
Edgelands is this year's theme. It can be interpreted in wide range of ways – both literally as the forgotten outskirts of the city and more abstractly as the margins of a composition. Edgelands coincides with the publication of a book of the same name by the poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley. This book deals with the edges of the contemporary city, just one of the many interpretations of the word.
Marion Shoard, contemporary environmentalist, interprets Edgelands as the space between the city and the country: vast in area, though hardly noticed. The Boyle family create exact replicas of areas of ground selected at random by throwing a dart at a map of the world. The results are beautiful reproductions of the mundane surfaces of the planet – from pavement edges, to tide marks on sand.
Other interpretations focus on the emotional edgelands of the human mind, the relationship between a troubled intellect and the creative process. Van Gogh’s series of paintings made from the window of his asylum. Munch’s use of personal symbolism to document traumatic experiences.
Edgelands may also be a moment in time away from the everyday: Henry Moore’s underground drawings capture a time and place removed from daily routine. Giorgio De Chirico’s surreal, deserted cityscapes combine fantasy and reality. Piranesi’s fantastical prison interiors.
Edgelands can be interpreted through the objects and materials that inhabit them: John Piper’s ‘line of magnificent wreckage’, describing the flotsam and jetsam discarded on the edge of British beaches. Tony Cragg’s discarded plastic items and Paolozzi’s found objects collaged into sculptures and prints
