For the past 4 days I have been at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambs as one of the artists selected for the first Escalator Retreat programme this year. Feeling rather exhausted from my lecturing post I was looking forward to lying back a bit, listening to artists discuss their practice. HOWEVER the reality was that it was an action packed programme organised I have to say, extremely competantly by students from The Royal College of Art’s MA Curatorial practice course alongside Donna Lynas and Lotte Juul Petersen.
We had a series of talks from a variety of artists including Stefan Rusu, Margarita Gluzberg, Heim Lattner and Charles Avery as well drawing workshops, group crits, philosophical discussions and a walk involving storytelling as we went along.
Kit Hammonds, tutor and independent curator, alongside all of the students involved had considered the topics and artists extremely well. Myself and therest of the selected artists and curators on the retreat all found that our practice overlapped time and time again throughout these four days.
Wysing was as a venue an exciting place to be, meeting studio artists, curators and directors across those few days and on the last day of the retreat we were all surprised to hear that we had all been awarded the escalator artist badge should we want it. This was great news to us all as we had all got on really well supporting each other throughout. We will be meeting up again in a couple of weeks to discuss the retreat as well as discuss any project work that we hope to carry through as a result of the retreat.
The other artists and curators selected are:
WIll Clifford, Lucy Conochie, Sarah Evans, Bettina Furnee, , Catherine Hemelryk, Jo Mardell, Mark Ross, Rachel Moxley and Caroline Wright
