The Artist’s Studio, Corsham Court

The artist’s studio is central to popular understandings of creative practice. It is privileged in the annals of Art History as a site of creative production, where the event of making (and thinking towards making) is located. In this sense, the studio is part real and part imagined, acting as both an architectural form and a metaphoric device (a repository for our creative ideals). Philip Guston, a painter, once commented that, ‘There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.’

As a metonym, the studio encapsulates a spirit of endeavour among those who operate at the interstices of creative practice and aesthetic production. As a physical structure, the studio contains the people and objects that fulfill our expectations of purposive and meaningful cultural activity. Indeed, the studio is arguably operating in excess of itself; it is more than the workplace of an artist. The studio also functions as a holding-place for our dreams of unique social and personal relations, our desire for a free space where time unfolds in a rhythmic contrast to everyday life.

Is it any wonder, then, that the studio ideal might remain hidden from view? The Artist’s Studio is an exhibition that offers a unique opportunity to glimpse the secreted world of artistic production, providing a behind-the-scenes view of seven artists at their workstations: Colin Crumplin (painter), Ron George (painter), Maria Lalic (painter), Michael Pennie (sculptor), Malcolm Ross-White (ceramicist), Jack Shirreff (fine art printer) and Michael Simpson (painter). These workstations have been captured in wide or panoramic format by panographer, John Law. The show of panoramic photographs is accompanied by an exhibition of work by the featured artists - including paintings, sculptures, ceramics and prints - as well as an original screenprint by Howard Hodgkin called, ‘For Jack’.

The Artist’s Studio is located at Corsham Court, which has been home to Bath Academy of Art since the late 1940s. The exhibition celebrates a place where the artist’s studio has the capacity to realize its most idealistic aspects (being set within an idyllic rural setting), as well as to encounter itself as a space dedicated to artistic production. Michael Simpson, a painter featured in this exhibition, acknowledges the dual orientation of the studios at Corsham Court, commenting that:

“I sometimes suggested we had a clocking in machine which would – in a sense – de-romanticise this whole subject … and somehow get the students coming in at 9 o’clock … making it much more like a workplace, rather than a place to dream and wonder and romanticize. What I’m talking about is self-discipline … I’ve always believed that making art is about hard labour.”

Click here for link to John Law's panoramas of The Artist's Studio, Corsham Court