Talk

A conversation between two industries: art and fashion

Helene Schjerfbeck

Wednesday 23 October 2019 6.30 - 7.45pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts

£15, £9 concessions

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Professor Annamari Vänskä will not be participating on the panel. We are delighted to welcome Eliza Bonham-Carter, head of the RA schools, to the panel.

Helene Schjerfbeck

Go to the exhibition

Join us as our panel, including Curator Oriole Cullen and artist Ehryn Torrell look at the contribution both art and fashion make to artistic innovation and creative expression.

Who are the artists sitting on the intersection of both fields? What is the relationship between fashion and art? Are there benefits and negatives of the two fields being associated? To what extent are these two creative industries linked?

In this discussion, chaired by academic and critic Shahidha Bari, our panel – which includes curator & head of the Royal Academy Schools, Eliza Bonham Carter, curator of Modern Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Oriole Cullen and contemporary artist, Ehryn Torrell – springboards from Helene Schjerfbeck’s interest in fashion magazines and style, to investigate how art and fashion influence each other.

We'll look past the traditional partnerships between luxury fashion brands and artists (such as Elsa Schapiarelli x Salvador Dalí or Longchamp x Tracey Emin RA), to contemporary genre-crossing collaborations, where artists are on the fringes of both disciplines, and discuss what the future of fashion and art collaborations will look like.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Professor Annamari Vänskä will now not be participating on the panel. We are delighted to welcome Eliza Bonham Carter in her place.

Shahidha Bari (Chair) is a critic, academic and broadcaster working in the fields of literature, philosophy and visual culture. She is Professor of Fashion Cultures at London College of Fashion and is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the LSE. She was winner of the Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism (2015) and she writes regularly for the Financial Times, Frieze and the Guardian among others. She presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 and Front Row on BBC Radio 4. She is the author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes.

Oriole Cullen is curator of Modern Fashion and Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she has worked on exhibitions such as Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, Ballgowns: British Glamour and Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. She also oversees the Museum’s Fashion in Motion programme working with contemporary fashion designers to stage a series of live fashion events held within the Museum. Prior to joining the V&A she was curator for Dress and Decorative Arts at the Museum of London. She has published widely on the subject of fashion and history of dress and recent publications include Francis Marshall: Drawing Fashion and Christian Dior.

Ehryn Torrell is an artist who works in painting, collage and textiles. She is interested in visual culture and how it imprints human bodies, engaging activities like mark-making, collage, scanning, printing, and stitching as forms of resistance. In her current work, she creates collage with paint and imagery torn from British Vogue magazines to look carefully at an archive and its portrayal of gender, race and sexuality. These collages take the form of fragmented compositions, some of which are digitally printed as textiles, where material and imagery are interrogated further with embroidery and quilting. She is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies and grants, most recently from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has exhibited internationally, including The Future is Female at Dellasposa (London), the touring solo exhibition Self-Similar organised by St. Mary's University Art Gallery (Halifax, Canada), The Painting Project by Galerie de L’UQAM (Montreal) and exhibitions at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (China), Art Gallery of Guelph (Canada), Museu de Arte de Joinville (Brazil), Gerald Moore Gallery (UK), and Grimsby Public Art Gallery (Canada).

Eliza Bonham Carter is Curator & Head of the Royal Academy Schools in London, a position she has held since 2006. In 2016 and 2017 she worked with the British Fashion Council on Fashion Art Commissions which brought early career artists and fashion designers to collaborate on the creation of new works. Eliza Bonham Carter is Vice Chair of Camden Arts Centre and a member of the Council of the British School at Rome.

£15, £9 concessions

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Professor Annamari Vänskä will not be participating on the panel. We are delighted to welcome Eliza Bonham-Carter, head of the RA schools, to the panel.