Catherine Yass: Double Agent
At the end of the 1990s the Ruskin School of Art received funding from a variety of sources for a series of visual arts projects that collectively formed part of the Millennium celebrations for Year of the Artist. Year of the Artist aimed to raise the status and profile of living artists by placing 1000 artists in 1000 residencies across the country, taking them out of the traditional spaces usually associated with art and placing them in unusual and surprising locations.
Sir Roger Penrose: Shadows of the Mind
Research and the Artist: Considering the Role of the Art School
The Ruskin School of Art organised a symposium at St Anne’s College, Oxford on Friday 28 May 1999, which explored the future of research in the visual arts with reference to the role that art schools could play in this area. It was staged for an invited audience of over 100 people representing the higher education and public arts funding sectors, relevant government agencies, and charitable trusts and foundations.
The John Berger Lectures
The John Berger Lectures take place on an occasional basis and focus on various aspects of art history. The overall title salutes the seminal and ongoing contribution of John Berger to the study of the visual arts.
Brook Andrew, Susan Collins, Elizabeth Gertsakis and Graham Gussin: Tumblong
Tumblong was an online project that encouraged the production of new art exploring the historic and contemporary connections between Britain and Australia.
Zarina Bhimji, Martha Fleming, Susan Hiller, Sharon Kivland, Brighid Lowe, Cornelia Parker: Inserts
Inserts published commissioned artworks in a variety of specialist magazines and academic journals in the years leading up to the Millennium. This enabled contemporary art to appear in and interact with contexts where it would not normally be found and address audiences that do not necessarily associate visual art and artists with their professional or leisure interests.
Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship
The Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship was established by the Ruskin School of Art and the British School at Rome to help emerging and established artists make new work by spending periods of time in Oxford and Rome. After visiting Italy for a one-month reconnaissance period, the artist devoted two months to research on their chosen topic in England before returning to Italy for three months of intensive studio-based production.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Pendulum
Pendulum was an investigation into the nature of dual citizenship and developed out of Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Visiting Fellowship at the Maison Française d’Oxford in 1997. The Maison Française is a social and human sciences research and cultural centre established by the University of Oxford and the Universities of Paris and serves as a forum for Anglo-French debate.
Stephen Farthing: Cleft Surgery and Facial Appearance
The cleft lip and palate deformity is a common congenital anomaly affecting approximately 1:650 newborn babies. The cleft anomaly covers the whole spectrum of deformity from a minor problem such as an incomplete unilateral cleft of the lip to a devastating deformity as in a child with a complete bilateral cleft of the lip and palate.
Simon Callery: Segsbury Project
In 1996 Simon Callery was given an opportunity to work alongside archaeologists from the University of Oxford who had recently begun excavating prehistoric and Romano-British sites on the Ridgeway, a chalk downland in central southern England and one of the oldest trackways in Europe. Nobody at the time, least of all the artist himself, expected the association to flourish in quite the way it did, and for seven years Oxford’s archaeologists invited Callery to accompany them on three major digs.
Stefan Gec: Buoy
