British Art Talks

The British Art Talks podcast is a new audio series from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It features new research and aims to enhance and expand knowledge of British art and architecture.

Episodes

Experiments in Art Writing: Roger Robinson

Award winning writer Roger Robinson talks to Anna Reid about the interplay of poetry with painting and portraiture.

Experiments in Art Writing: Maria Fusco

Maria Fusco, author of Give Up Art: Collected Critical Writing, ECZEMA!, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer and Master Rock talks to Anna Reid about formative influences on her writing.

Experiments in Art Writing: Adrian Rifkin

Adrian Rifkin joins Anna Reid to share a set of texts that speak of the formation of his own practice as a renowned art historian and creative writer.

Experiments in Art Writing: Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant, Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures departments at Goldsmiths, talks about some of the most exciting contemporary developments in art writing.

Elizabeth Price: A Gothic Choir: Part 3, Song and Dans

Ryan Gander: DIFFICULT TRUTHS TO LIVE INSIDE - TROUBLE WITH TIME

In this episode of British Art Talks, an array of artists is enlisted in a quixotic project: a countdown from fifty in bingo calls. First, a story, part of a beat poem, narrated by Ryan as author, to his daughter, Penny.

Elizabeth Price: A Gothic Choir: Part 2, Plans and Elevations

Elizabeth Price: A Gothic Choir: Part 1

Revelatory photographs of the ecclesiastical architecture of Gloucester, Exeter, and Winchester cathedrals shape part one of this talk, with the voice of the artist and exemplar footage drawn of her body of moving-image work.

Lucy Skaer: Leaving the House

Artist Lucy Skaer speaks in situ about leaving her family home as the sold signs go up outside. She charts the influence of the house on her and on the work she has made over the years from parts of the building, and looks more generally at how artists find their narrative in the world.

The Medicinal Garden

This episode brings together Clare Hickman, Claire Preston and Carole Rawcliffe, scholars whose diverse researches shed new light on the physic, botanical and medicinal garden from the medieval to the eighteenth century.

“Things in their natural surroundings”?: Marketing the British Country House as Home

Kate Retford considers the development of the idea of the country house as ‘family home’ (whether actual, past or imagined) as an ideal setting for works of art through the twentieth century.

Exploring London's Art Scene in the 1960s

Lisa Tickner and Mark Hallett talk about the remarkable array of artists, curators, galleries, art-schools, films, publications and documentaries that emerged in 1960s London.

Hard Times and the Late Victorian Art

Alex Potts investigates representations of migrancy and insecure labour in the Victorian age.

The English Carthusians and the art of abstinence

Julian Luxford considers the art and architectural dimensions of Carthusian life with particular reference to the ten foundations of the order’s English Province.

“What will survive of us is love”: Memory and Emotion in Late-Medieval England

Jessica Barker explores ‘expressivity’ in late-medieval sculpture.

William Etty and the Classical Body

This episode is a discussion between Classicist Mary Beard and art historian Cora Gilroy-Ware, author of The Classical Body in Romantic Britain. It hones in on Etty’s 1837 The Sirens and Ulysses.