THE CORNWALL SCHOOLS ART COLLECTION
AT FALMOUTH ART GALLERY & ROYAL CORNWALL MUSEUM
CURATED BY LIZZY BROUGHTON
With an interest in enriching the arts in education, the collection covers painting, drawing, collage, print, sculpture, textiles and ceramics, there is an incredibly diverse range of mediums and styles to inspire and ignite curiosity in younger generations growing up in the area. The collection began back in the early 1960’s, following an anonymous donation to Cornwall Council in 1961, with a note attached reading “To help primary school funds”. Whilst the collection includes many artists from all areas of Cornwall and further afield, there are also some key figures with links to the Falmouth area, giving a peek at an uncovered slice of local art history. More works from the collection were on display in a partnership exhibition at the Philbrick Gallery at the Royal Cornwall Museum.
This collection began forming as early as 1961, following an anonymous donation of money to Cornwall Council with a note attached reading ‘To help primary school funds’. After some debate the Council decided to use the money to buy artworks for school children, so that they could interact with and learn from them. The Council wrote to well-known artists to see if they would gift or sell a piece of work for a reduced price.
The first work in the collection was ‘Frisky’ by Jacob Epstein, a small bronze sculpture of his beloved sheepdog. It went on tour to different schools and proved so popular that the Council agreed to put aside money every year to collect more pieces of art. Barbara Hepworth and Michael Finn (Principal at the Falmouth School of Art) were the Council’s advisors, helping them to contact artists and grow the collection over the years.
The collection contains works by artists such as: Barbara Hepworth, Sir Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson, Leonard Fuller, Alethea Garstin, Patrick Heron, Bernard Leach, Janet Leach, Alexander MacKenzie, Lionel Miskin, Denis Mitchell, Dod Proctor, John Milne, John Wells, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Hayman, Bryan Wynter and many more. Some of the artists were on display at Falmouth Art Gallery, whilst others can be found at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro in their sister exhibition.
The Royal Cornwall Museum and its staff have been the caretakers and stewards of the collection since 2011; safeguarding, maintaining, loaning and exhibiting the collection for the enjoyment of future generations of our young bright artists and creatives.
CURATORIAL TASK: REFLECTIVE WRITING
The Cornwall Council Schools Art Collection and a Trainee Curator – Through Lockdown and Beyond
Lizzy Broughton
The trainee curator’s program was set up by Cornwall Museums Partnership and hosts five young trainee curators across four museums in Cornwall, aiming to diversify the workforce in our cultural and heritage institutions. I am Lizzy Broughton and I’m the trainee curator currently hosted at Falmouth Art Gallery. My specialism is in contemporary art and I did my BA degree in Fine Art at Falmouth University, so this was a humbling opportunity to work in a familiar environment surrounded by both contemporary and historical art. My time here has been full of new and varying experiences, from learning how to accession items into the collection, manage the catalogue, process loan requests, condition check artworks, hang a show and prepare artworks for transport. I have also enjoyed my time spent with the other trainees on our trips to other museums around Cornwall and in London, they have been a fantastic, hilarious and supportive bunch.
A lot of my time has been spent researching and focusing on the Cornwall Council Schools Art Collection and the subsequent exhibition of the collection. This project began when Falmouth Art Gallery took on responsibilities for the collection after the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro closed its doors at the start of 2020. Our collections manager Natalie Rigby oversaw loan requests and transportation of works for loan and I was invited to take charge of the exhibition at Falmouth Art Gallery opening in September.
The Cornwall Council Schools Art Collection began forming as early as 1961, following an anonymous donation of money to Cornwall Council with a note attached reading ‘To help primary school funds’. After some debate the Council decided to use the money to buy artworks for school children, so that they could interact with and learn from them. The Council wrote to well-known artists to see if they would gift or sell a piece of work for a reduced price.
The first work in the collection was ‘Frisky’ by Jacob Epstein, a small bronze sculpture of his beloved sheepdog. It went on tour to different schools and proved so popular that the Council agreed to put aside money every year to collect more pieces of art. Barbara Hepworth and Michael Finn (Principal at the Falmouth School of Art) were the Council’s advisors, helping them to contact artists and grow the collection over the years.
My aims with this exhibition were to raise awareness of the collection as it had been in storage for some time and hadn’t been circulated through local schools as regularly as it could have been. I wanted to reintroduce the public to the works in the collection and bring it to a new audience of young people and children who could benefit from it.
Just before lockdown in March I made a few trips over to the Cornwall archives at Kresen Kernow to seek out the original letters from Cornwall Council to the artists in the collection. I scoured through their online catalogue and came across a whole section of documents and some of the original catalogues for the collection, which were amazing to see in person. Overall there must have been thousands of letters – I couldn’t get through them all before the lockdown, but what I did go though I luckily managed to scan and digitize. It felt like finding buried treasure, holding these fragile old letters from people like Barbara Hepworth and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, surviving from decades ago safely stored here in this amazing building, reading their words and feeling like they were talking to me here and now. The lockdown gave me plenty of time to really delve into the research for the collection and familiarize myself with the artworks and artists involved. Overall, there are around 90 artists in the collection and around 120 works in total, so there was plenty to research through the months between March and July while working from home.
Returning to the gallery was daunting at first but I started getting back into the building in July, masked-up and sanitized, ready to install our latest temporary exhibitions for reopening. Returning to the practical side of curatorial work, getting in the building and handling art again, was a welcome break from sitting at a laptop all day poring over websites and old documents.
During this time it was suggested that we could also curate a second exhibition of the Schools Art Collection over at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro in time for their big reopening in September. I agreed and took on a second, simultaneous exhibition, taking on more work and new deadlines, but a fantastic experience to prove my ability to focus and work hard under pressure.
We spent the week at RCM leading up to their reopening on the 12th September, bringing along with us a piece from our collection: Terry Frost’s ‘Orchard Tambourine B’, mirroring a similar popular work in the Council Collection. We hung ‘Orchard Tambourine B first’, using it as the central point of focus, situating it opposite the entrance to the gallery, giving visitors a big ‘wow’ impact upon first entering. Curating this collection in the gallery space was an inspiring experience, some of these artworks I had never seen before as they hadn’t been photographed, so it was a challenge working with art I had never even seen before. With everything in the space though, my ideas fell into place easily and it didn’t take me too long to work out a flow for the room, grouping works together that really played on each-others qualities and highlighted their characteristics.
Straight after finishing up at RCM I had to spend a couple of days packing up the artworks for transportation to Falmouth Art Gallery for our exhibition here. We had the works transported via courier and unpacked them in the gallery spaces, laying them out around the rooms again so that I could see the works and get ideas about how to arrange them. The exhibition was to be installed in the Middle and Permanent Galleries, so I had free reign over two whole rooms. I used the Middle Gallery to provide an overview of the collection, highlighting important works and important artists, displaying a range of paintings, prints and sculptures. The Permanent Gallery I used to highlight artists with connections to Falmouth, whether they had taught at the Falmouth School of Art, worked in the area, had local connections or were vocal supporters of the School of Art, celebrating the town and its abundance of creativity. We also put the larger sculptures on plinths in this room due to it being larger and having more space for visitors to view the sculptures from all angles.
I curated these artworks in the gallery space where I had room to experiment with the layout and groupings of works. The Middle Gallery was a breeze and I had it set out, spaced and ready to hang fairly quickly, but the Permanent Gallery proved to be a little more difficult due to the varying sizes, mediums, themes and techniques involved. This was the last hurdle, so I took a step back and came back the next day with fresh eyes to finish it.
I also had the opportunity to assist in creating films of the exhibition to provide online learning resources, interviewing artists and talking about which works I particularly like, which I found a bit unnerving at first (I’m a bit camera shy!) but this proved to be a lot more fun than I had first anticipated.
It has been a truly fantastic opportunity to create two exhibitions of this scale, with such an important collection, across two separate venues and I have learnt so much about the artworks and myself during this time. I truly hope that my exhibitions have brought moments of joy to our visitors after the easing of lockdown and has shed new light on the Cornwall Council Schools Art Collection. I want this collection to find more uses out in the community and for school children to be able to interact with it again, creating projects and learning from the works. Art is an undervalued subject in our schools, but bringing in works by renowned artists and seeing how children react to them shows us that it is an important staple of our society and has the power to bring joy to its audiences.