Rose Garrard: Casting Room at Kettle's Yard

Dr Amy Tobin has organised a new display of work by the British artist Rose Garrard at Kettle's Yard. The display is a partial recreation of Garrard's 1986 performance-installation Casting Room I: An Historical Experiment – Actions to Reveal the Distortion Process, and comprises a series of plaster panels embedded with recessed portraits of women artists and the page three section of The Sun newspaper. Made for the exhibition 'Third Generation Women Sculptors' the work is a feminist-influenced exploration of permenance and contingency. On one level this concerns the history of women artists, and the circulation of women in advertising and popular media, but Casting Room also investigates sculptural form and process, specifically the use of plaster in the making, preservation and circualtion of art. The work comes to Cambridge after an extensive archival project and significant conservation organsied by Amy Tobin, with the artist and Catherine Elwes. While Garrard raised questions around the absence of women artists in the history of art with this work in the 1980s, its re-presentation in 2019 prompts us to think about the precarity of Garrard's history, and to consider how experimental, contingent and precarious art works and art histories might be maintained for future scholars. It is also a celebration of the acquisition of Garrard's papers by Tate Library and Archive.

For more information visit the Kettle's Yard website: http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/events/rose-garrard-casting-room-i/

Find out more about the free curator's talk on 6 February visit: http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/events/rose-garrards-casting-room-talk/