Collaborative Curatorial Residency: Amanda Roderick & Bella Kerr, 18 October – 15 November
Curator name: Amanda Roderick
Dates of residency: 18 October – 15 November
Born: 1972
Hometown: Port Talbot, Wales
Lives and works: Swansea, Wales
URL: www.missiongallery.co.uk; www.civicarchive.co.uk
Education: BA Art & Design & Theory 1994-97, University of East Anglia, England
Curator name: Bella Kerr
Dates of residency: 18 October – 15 November
Born: 1960
Hometown: London
Lives and works: Cardiff & Swansea, Wales, UK
URL: www.civicarchive.com; www.keepers-exhibition.com
Education: MPhil, Swansea Metropolitan University, Wales, 2008; PGDIp Goldsmiths College, London, 1989; BA Hons Fine Art, Middlesex Polytechnic, London 1985
Bio/ Statement:
Amanda Roderick has been Mission Gallery’s Director since April 2011, following several years as its Gallery Development Officer. After training as an artist, Amanda returned to Wales to work and has had wide ranging experience in various roles at Mission Gallery ever since. These include assisting with achieving its status as a Revenue Funded Organization of the Arts Council of Wales in 2003 to overseeing its current phase of Major Capital Redevelopment. She has been involved in the curation of many major exhibitions by artists in Wales and beyond, alongside successful collaborative projects within the UK and on an international level. Engagement, partnership working and building new audiences is a personal and organizational priority, alongside diverse and distinctive programming of contemporary visual art, applied art and design. Amanda is an active and committed member of the artistic community in Swansea, serving on the board of Swansea International Festival, the Jane Phillips Award and was also a member of the Public Art Steering Group for Swansea's Boulevard & Waterfront Connections Project.
Bella Kerr: Active as an artist since graduating, I have been teaching for the last 25 years and leading the Art & Design Foundation course at Swansea College of Art for more than 10 years. I enjoy balancing the demands of this role with academic research, my personal practice and more recently participatory, collaborative and curatorial projects. Many aspects of my recent visual and curatorial work reflect the communication, administrative skills and pedagogical understanding developed through teaching, and using this cross-referencing or ‘overlap’ has been important to the development of my overall practice.
Recent projects include: Keeper (s) (Mission Gallery, 2013) An exhibition consisting of physical structures that were moved around the gallery space week by week, and four artists, including myself – the Keeper (s) – who occupied the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition, activating the installation as a changing set for activities and events. The work utilised ideas developed in my previous MPhil research in 2008, Reading Rooms: Manifestations of Domestic Space in Visual Art and Literature, but moved beyond the confines of the domestic, to consider the interactions of the gallery and education.
Civic: Considering the City: Architecture, Art and the Urban Environment (Mission Gallery, 2014) Initially developed as an exhibition, in curatorial collaboration with Amanda Roderick, focusing on the city of Swansea. Before the exhibition we met with architects, artists, writers, academics and others and walked and talked the city to start to approach the questions it posed. The idea of knowing the city was proposed to counterbalance the notion of urban space as problem. We considered how psycho-geographical readings of the city and literary and cinematic depictions describe and reframe the city without requiring resolution; how these practices might inform proposals, and how visual artists/writers might assist the mediation between the conceptual and the material?
Support: Amanda Roderick & Bella Kerr’s residency is made possible with the support from Wales Arts International, Swansea College of Art UWTSD and Mission Gallery.
