An art education multipack of perspectives and contexts in Sideshow

Food Bank/STILL Life 

Food Bank/STILL Life is a participatory activity series exploring food waste, poverty, community and social encounters, led by BA Fine Art Senior Lecturer Sarah Cole in partnership with London volunteer initiative Food for All, Waitrose King’s Cross and Euston Food Bank. Food for All supplied free hot meals to students and exhibition visitors on opening day, shared over a Queer Picnic in the gallery led by students on the XD pathway.

A tableaux of donated food products forms the subject for workshops and related activities throughout the exhibition that give students, staff and public a chance to write, draw, have conversations and reflect. The table is reorganised for each day’s activity, with regular drop offs to Euston Food Bank. Upending the classic still life, Food Bank/STILL Life comes out of work tested by Cole and artistic partner Annis Joslin in Brighton last year.

With wider concerns around poverty and food waste and the University’s Climate Action Plan taking hold, it was an opportunity to take this idea into the space and give people a way to engage here at CSM. For Cole, whose work is all about community and bringing people together:

Gilbert Bays finials project: BA Fine Art and The People’s Museum, Somers Town 

BA Fine Art students, graduates and staff have been working closely with local residents and The People's Museum in Somers Town on a project that is helping to restore the historic Gilbert Bays finials created nearly a century ago for the local community.

Inspired by characters in children’s fairytales of that period, the finials are a set of around 100 decorative sculptures designed by the artist Gilbert Bayes in the 1930s, specifically to sit on top of washing lines in the courtyards of St Pancras Housing Association estates. Most of these cultural artefacts have been stolen and lost to their community and locality over time.

Students and graduates have been working with the museum to digitally scan the existing finials and remodel the missing set. A public workshop at Sideshow on 17 January will showcase this digital remastering, revealing the research process, digital workflow and 3D digital assembly of one of the filial designs.

Agents of Deterioriation: Prisoners of Love project

Agents of Deterioration is a staff and student project working through contemporary art to explore and challenge the constraining legacies of museum practices and experiment with possibilities for connection and sharing.

“Many Indigenous peoples challenge the idea of preservation as a greater good, instead affirming the right to renew and use, enliven and care for objects as part of community life.” Louisa Minkin, Reader in Visual Art Practices and Art Programme Research into Teaching Co-ordinator

Within this framing, the project Prisoners of Love aims to connect items in UK art collections with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex collection histories and material practices. The group have been working with museums and institutions in London, Mumbai in India, Oxford, Accra in Ghana, Hastings and Alberta, Canada. The exhibition Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, at the Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, reflects on the long-term work of the Blackfoot community towards revitalisation and restitution, always guided by the Blackfoot principle that we have a responsibility to share and to care for knowledge.

Multidisciplinary artist Dawn Codex graduated from MA Fine Art in 2023. Dawn and other artists have been working at Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford as part of Prisoners of Love. They were invited to go through the Pitt Rivers’ collection records and to choose specific objects in the collection.

"We discussed how we felt about these objects. And how we could repurpose them in relation to our practice. These are orphan objects and taken objects. We don’t know their stories but we know that they were taken. So it’s about supporting museums with the task they are facing and how they can come up with strategies around these works in the present day."

Dawn’s own practice spans sculpture, sound, found objects, artificial intelligence and performance. Showing in Sideshow is Dawn’s body of work with a post-post AI narrative that reimagines the city of London as a future spiritual indigenous site – a commentary on finance, trade and the commoditisation of the feminine, including the earth.

“Agents of Deterioration is about the idea that an object no longer has purpose if it deteriorates. But this is really a Western consumerist idea. I’m interested in the layering of things over time. Something can be damaged, used and repaired yet still be beautiful and meaningful - this really speaks to my practice”