Interview with Clive Robertson

Rebecca and Heike met with Clive Robertson this week in London; Clive is an artist, critic and publisher, now based at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

After studying at Plymouth and Liverpool art colleges, Clive went to Cardiff College of Art in 1967, in part attracted by the new teaching approaches being pioneered by Tom Hudson and his colleagues.  He recalled Robin Page, a Fluxus artist, coming to Cardiff to give his Action Lecture on War as part of the regular symposiums held by the college.  Clive also talked about his own work, more information of which can be found on our database.  Clive went on to complete at MFA at Reading University before moving to Canada and establishing the W.O.R.K.S.R.E.P.O.R.T. - more information on this can be found on Clive's webpage (click on the title to this blog entry above).

Interview with Keith Wood

Keith Wood came to Cardiff College of Art in 1966, and began making performances as a student.  Some of these were solo affairs, such as an explosion in the car park during one early experimentation, while others were done in collaboration with other students, including John Danvers. In a number of the interviews, Keith has been named as being very influential on his fellow students and others that he worked with later on.

After leaving college, Keith continued his interest performance, firstly with his own group, the Keith Wood Group, and later with Highway Shoes - Chapter's company in residence - before leaving for the USA, a regular theme in his later work.  For more information on these, please see the database on our website, http://www.performance-wales.org/

Rebecca and Heike met with Keith to talk about his early interest in performance and its development, along with some of his productions, including The Nighthawk which starred Mike Pearson, and The Gospel According To Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. 

Interview with Marty St James



Marty St James on 'Mr & Mrs', HTV (1977) Image courtesy of Marty St James


  We interviewed Marty St James, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and former student of Cardiff College of Art at his London studio this week. Marty has been making performance work since his late teens, working with Ian Hinchliffe, Rob Con, Roland Miller and Shirley Cameron amongst many others.


At Cardiff, he made a number of pieces for the symposium that John Gingell ran in the Reardon Smith auditorium, and made an appearance on the HTV show 'Mr and Mrs' as part of his final year show. After graduating, he continued to produce conceptual and performance pieces around Wales, including his 'Morris 1000 Dancing' which visited a number of towns and villages, and 'I'll See You' which he presented at several art centres.


We would like to thank Marty for allowing us to interview him, and also for his help in identifying some of the images of his work that we have found in different archives.

Interviews with Joan Baker and Anne Gingell

Rebecca met with Joan Baker and Anne Gingell today, to hear their memories of Cardiff College of Art from the 1960s and 1970s. 

Joan Baker studied art at Cardiff, before going on to teach at other colleges including Bath.  She returned to Cardiff and taught there for 38 years, working closely with Tom Hudson.

Anne Gingell moved to Cardiff in 1966 when her husband, John, took up a teaching post at the college. John Gingell was very interested in performance, and his ‘Alternative Studies’ course at the college laid the foundations for the establishment of the Third Area, later to become the Space Workshop.

We are still looking for former students from the college. If you took part in performances with John Gingell, or were one of the students experimenting with performance and sound in the early 1960s (or earlier!) then we would love to hear from you.

Thanks to Joan Baker and Anne Gingell for their support for the project.