Interview with Wyndham Heycock - Barry Summer School

Heike and Rebecca met Wyndham Heycock, co-director of Barry Summer School with the artist Leslie Moore, from 1962-1973. It was during this period that the school reached its peak, attracting artists and musicians from across the world to teach at Barry, including George Brecht, John Epstein, Roland Miller, Terry Setch, Harry Thubron, Ernest Zobole and jazz musicians including Larry Adler. We'd like to thank Wyndham Heycock, and his wife Sally, for their help with the project.

The photo below is of a group of students listening to Tom Hudson speak at the Summer School around 1965 (click on the photo to enlarge it); if you can identify any of the people in the picture, or you attended any of the art or music courses during the 1960s and early 1970s - please email us at mail@performance-wales.org

Future Presentation - London July 2010

Heike will be presenting a paper based on her oral history work at the annual conference of the Oral History Society:

"Performing an Oral History of Performance Art in Wales" - "[Record] [Create] Oral History in Art, Craft and Design (Oral History Society Annual Conference 2010"
Victoria & Albert Museum London, 2+3 July 2010

Presentations - London April 2010

Heike presented a paper based on her oral history work at a symposium in London this week:

An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales', at the "Oral History/Theatre History: Past - Present - Future" conference, Rose Bruford College London, 17 April 2010.
More information:http://www.str.org.uk/events/other/archive/oralhistory2010.shtml
 

Future Presentation - Theorising Wales Conference, July 2010

Heike and Rebecca will be presenting a paper at the Theorising Wales conference, organised by Swansea University. The conference will be held at Gregynog Hall between 12th and 14th July.

The paper will consider the emergence of Wales and Welshness as concerns in visual art practice in the late 1970s, with particular reference to the practice of performance art & the National Eisteddfod of 1977.

Further details about the conference can be found here: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/CREW/Conferences/TheorisingWales/  

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.

Interview with Sybil Crouch, Taliesin

Rebecca interviewed Sybil Crouch today, of Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea. Sybil was a student in Swansea and later went to work for West Wales Arts based in Carmarthen, taking charge of their art programmes. Part of our discussion was on the Swansea University Festival in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included work by Gustav Metzger, Ivor Davies and Jeffrey Shaw. If you attended the festival or Pavilions in the Park or perhaps saw Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller as Cyclamen Cyclists in Swansea Docks then we would love to hear from you.

If you wish to jog your memory try our database, which contains over 2000 entries of performance art events in Wales and is available through the project’s website at http://www.performance-wales.org/

 

Thanks Sybil for sharing your memories with us.

Presentations in Glasgow and Liverpool

Heike gave two presentations on the project over the past week.

Heike contributed to a roundtable on Remembering Performance as part of the 30-anniversary edition of the National Review of Live Art Festival in Glasgow. Other participants included Claire MacDonald, Richard Layzell, Fiona Wright and Paul Clarke.

Sunday 21 March 2010, 11am -1pm at The Arches in Glasgow.

Further details are available at:

http://www.newmoves.co.uk/event-list-2010-national-review-of-live-art/40-national-review-of-live-art/697-remembering-performance-panel-discussion 

 

Heike presented a paper on her research into the development of performance art at Cardiff School of Art in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Sculpture & Performance Conference, organised by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Tate Liverpool.
Friday 26 March 2010, 2pm at Tate Liverpool.
Further details are available at:http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/hmi/research/research-events/sculpture-performance

For future presentations visit http://www.performance-wales.org/english/events/lectures.htm

Interview with Glyn Jones

Glyn Jones was the Head of the School of Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art between 1972 and 1999.  Born in the Rhondda, he studied at Cardiff in the 1950s, before going to the Slade School of Fine Art in London.  Glyn has exhibited widely and is a member of the 56 Group.

We spoke to him about his career as a teacher and artist, and also about the development of Cardiff College of Art and of performance art in the college with the establishment of the so-called "Third Area" and later the "Space Workshop". 

If you were a student during this period, we would love to hear from you; please email mail@performance-wales.org

We'd like to thank Glyn for his support, and for sharing his memories with us.

Anti-bodies/Zoo Reunion

We are continuing the work on John Gingell's archive and this week interviewed three of his collaborators from the early 1970s.  John Danvers, Charles Garrad and Ken Hickman were all members of the Zoo Group, an artists' cooperative co-founded by Gingell in the early 1970s. 

John, Charles and Ken travelled down to Cardiff, to John Gingell's former home, to meet with us.  Along with talking about the Zoo Group work, Charles and John were students at Cardiff College of Art during the time that 'Alternative Studies' was being established, which went on to become the Third Area/Space Workshop.

The three were also members of the group 'Anti-bodies', which produced work around Europe in the early 1970s.

The interview summary will be available online on our website at some point soon.

We'd like to thank John, Charles and Ken, and also the Gingell family for their time and support and for contributing to the research.

Next, we hope to meet with more former students from Cardiff who were involved in performance work during this time.  If you would like more information about this, please email us at mail@performance-wales.org

Ian Breakwell exhibition in Derby - Unword (Swansea 1970)

The QUAD in Derby currently shows a retrospective of the late British artist Ian Breakwell.
Breakwell presented a number of performance pieces in Wales in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including UNWORD 4 at the Swansea University Arts Festival in 1970. A film documentation of the seminal UNWORD series, made with film-maker Mike Leggett, is on show at the QUAD.

Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness
QUAD Gallery, Corridors and Digital Screens
13th February 2010 – 18th April 2010
http://www.derbyquad.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/ian-breakwell

For information on UNWORD 4 go to:
http://www.performance-wales.org/english/archive/1970/1970.htm