Living Archives Podcast Episode 5: Joy Gregory and Anthea Hamilton
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In episode 5 of Living Archives, Joy Gregory and Anthea Hamilton share the ways their experiences have influenced their practice, the relationship between education and art-making and what plant life can teach us about being in the world.
Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.
Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, what Stuart Hall calls, a “living archive of the diaspora” which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain.
Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.
Hosted by Jessica Taylor
Edited by Chris Browne
Designs by Yolande Mutale
Music by LOX
Bios
Born in 1978 in London, Anthea Hamilton is a British artist known for creating large-scale installations and artworks. She graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 and the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005. Her practice encompasses film, installation, performance, and sculpture, and her work is frequently site-specific. Hamilton’s approach combines archival study, popular culture, and scientific research with resonant images and objects in unusual and surreal ways. Her installations engage visitors with imagined narratives that incorporate references from art, cinema, design, and fashion. Conversation and collaboration are key to her practice. In 2016 Hamilton was short-listed for the Turner Prize for Project for Door (2015). In 2018 she became the first Black woman to be awarded a commission to create a work for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.
Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She has developed a practice which is concerned with social and political issues with particular reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society.
As a photographer, she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research a major piece about language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010. She is continuing this work in the Kalahari with the descendants of two sisters who spoke the much-diminished language of N/u as their mother tongue.
She is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited all over the world showing in many festivals and biennales. Her work is included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London.
Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.