Summer Exhibition co-ordinator Ann Christopher RA on this year's show
By Emily Steer
Published on 24 June 2024
Emily Steer visits Summer Exhibition 2024 co-ordinator Ann Christopher RA in her Gloucestershire studio and learns how the artist’s experience of manipulating space as a sculptor has influenced this year’s show.
From the Summer 2024 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
“You’re working on gut instinct.” Ann Christopher RA is speaking about the intensive process of selecting works from around 16,500 applicants to feature in the Academy’s 256th Summer Exhibition. The sculptor is leading the process for the first time this year as co-ordinator; since her election as an RA in 1980, she has served on the selection committee for eight other iterations of the renowned annual show. We meet on a spring afternoon in her studio, where soft birdsong is audible almost constantly. She works out of a small country town just north of Bath.
The town is quiet when I visit, its streets lined by a selection of converted farm buildings and burgage plots with little sign of human activity. Ann’s former stable is the place where she both lives and works, surrounded by carefully kept gardens with wild woodlands to the rear. Inside, her kitchen and a snug seating area blend naturally into a high-ceilinged studio, around which her instantly recognisable asymmetric metal sculptures are gathered. Among these totemic works are clusters of smaller items, both collected and made by the artist. She shows me a small bronze sculpture, Venus Platform 2, completed shortly after she graduated from the West of England College of Art in 1969, which features rounded eruptions from its top, in stark contrast with her current angular aesthetic. The kitchen windowsill has a line of hand-sized bronzes cast from natural stones, into which the artist has added spear-like metal forms.
Christopher has been preparing for a solo show at Pangolin London this autumn, but much of her recent time has been dedicated to the Summer Exhibition, which involves leading a committee of six other Royal Academicians: Hurvin Anderson, Assemble, Anne Desmet, Hughie O’Donoghue, Cornelia Parker and Veronica Ryan. The group is chaired by Rebecca Salter PRA. “After goodness knows how many years of being an artist myself, I can recognise something distinctive, even if I don’t like it,” she says of her approach to selecting works for the show, some of which are made by famous names within the art world, others by first-time applicants who might have a part-time practice. “Not everybody is like that; I always have been.”
With roughly 1,200 works eventually going on display, the show requires an imaginative approach to curating. Each committee member is assigned one or more rooms in the Academy’s Main Galleries, and while there is no strict theme that informs the inclusion of every work, this year the group have thought extensively about the idea of space. “You can interpret this theme of space in different ways,” she tells me. “You could think of it as the space you make things in. Or making space for anybody and everybody. The crucial thing is to make the Summer Exhibition feel like it has space. My plan is to do with contrast. If you have a whopping great painting and then a lot of tiny ones, you’re getting a kind of space. I’ve shuffled around the allocation of rooms. For example, the architecture room isn’t where it has been for the past few years. It’s the kind of person I am: ‘Let’s rock the boat a bit!’”
The crucial thing is trying to make the Summer Exhibition feel like it has space. My plan is to do with contrast.
Each year’s selection committee invites a small number of high-profile artists to show work, alongside the hundreds of submissions from the general public. She mentions Rachel Whiteread and Charmaine Watkiss as some of this year’s invited artists. For a site-specific work in the Annenberg Courtyard, Christopher has invited Nicola Turner, who creates sinister sculptures that interweave human and non-human forms and movement, exploring life and death, attraction and repulsion. Susie MacMurray, who transforms everyday materials into dramatic sculptures that allude to nature, mythology and power, has also been invited. “Maybe I have slightly sombre taste,” Christopher laughs. She is also pleased about the inclusion of a large work by German artist Anselm Kiefer Hon RA. “I am very excited about that – his works are visceral.”
The hang is an ambitious undertaking. “It can be really tough,” says Christopher. “But if the committee get on together, it’s a lovely experience. As Academicians, we are very different from each other. We might meet at General Assemblies [governance meetings], and exhibition openings, but that’s about it. Hanging the Summer Show is a lovely opportunity to get to know fellow artists.” Her own practice has informed her knowledge of bringing potentially competing elements together in harmony. “Part of making sculpture is solving technical and spatial problems,” she says. “I’m also very interested in architecture. I think having that sort of mind helps with the hang.”
Christopher’s sculptures are often created in bronze or stainless steel, using a process that involves both her own hand and external foundries. Recently, her works have been highly architectural, comprising long and lean angular forms with a few strong feature lines cutting through them. Despite their almost mathematical feel, they each retain an individual character. Christopher works across drawing as well as sculpture, and her works on paper usually combine one or two very solid lines with a cacophony of colourful, jagged fine marks. “There is a contrast between precision and the handmade,” she says. “I do perhaps have a weird sort of desire for some kind of control.” Two of her drawings that will be shown in the Summer Exhibition have what she describes as ‘manic’ lines.
Christopher sees her drawing and sculptural practices as existing on the same level – one is not secondary to the other – and she tends to focus only on one at any given time. “They’re parallel, but separate,” she says. “If I’m drawing, I won’t be making sculpture.” She finds herself instinctively moving towards drawing when her sculpture practice is changing or going in a new direction. “The drawing gives my head time. When I want to make something different but I don’t yet know what it is, I start drawing.”
She takes inspiration from both the nature outside her front door and her travels around the world, including New York and its soaring buildings. For example, she tells me about Line From 3 Journeys, a bronze sculpture that looks like a vertical scalpel, with one straight length, one curved, and a diagonal line slicing across it. “I fell in love with a very simple white building in New York which looks like its top is cut off. I also remember my parents’ garden had a silver birch tree with a wiggle in its trunk. Both of those things turned into that sculpture.” Christopher is showing two sculptures from her Finding Stones series in this year’s Summer Exhibition (Finding Stones 4). “In this series I began collecting rocks from journeys and then transformed them with shapes emerging from or balancing on them – they become the natural world merging with the manmade.”
Christopher voraciously photographs the world around her, from city architecture to small details from her travels. “Pre-digital, I used to say to Ken [Cook, her late husband who was a highly skilled foundryman], ‘I don’t know why I put film in my camera. When I look through the viewfinder, it’s going straight into my brain.’” Before his death in 2023, Christopher worked closely with Cook. He opened his foundry in the 1970s, collaborating with fellow artists such as Elisabeth Frink, Leonard McComb and Ralph Brown. The foundry granted an element of control over the work for Christopher, but also collaboration. “Ken would cast everything except the very big works,” she says. “Quite often, once it was cast, it would come back to my studio and I would do the final finish on my bronzes.”
Christopher traces her interest in making back through the generations of her family. “One grandfather was a watchmaker and the other was a farrier, making horseshoes. I’ve got metal in the family.” Art – from making it to selecting and curating the work of others – is her reason for being, and her obsession with space finds its fullest expression in the expanse of her studio. “If I’m not working at all, I sort of implode,” she concludes. “The only time I’m really happy is when I’m actually making.”
Emily Steer is a journalist and former Editor of Elephant.
Summer Exhibition 2024 is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 18 June – 18 August 2024.
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