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.
Locating the early history of performance art in Wales, 1965-1979 www.performance-wales.org
- It was forty years ago today
- The project aims to 1. compile a comprehensive record of performance art events that were created in Wales between 1965 and 1979, and reveal an important but hitherto neglected aspect of Welsh art history. 2. chart the manner in which performance art as an international artistic movement was negotiated in response to a specific localized cultural context during its formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, and advance our knowledge and understanding of the origins and early developments of this art form. 3. trace the ways in which knowledge of past performance events is transmitted in both documentation and verbal recollections, and examine the evidential potential of documents and testimonials for the construction of performance art histories. 4. make freely available to other researchers in the field not just the analysis of the research findings but the following additional resources: a comprehensive, fully searchable online database of performance art events in Wales 1965–1979, which also indexes the current location of available documentation on these events; and a range of related oral history recordings and transcripts, deposited in key archives in the field.