New British Art
New British Art is an artist-led organisation made up of early career and more established fine art practitioners working across the range of disciplines.
The group exists to provide opportunities for collaborations between individual artists in order to enable the creation of large scale and ambitious artworks that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. The group provides an overarching function to:
- promote the creation of ambitious new collaborative works
- encourage younger or recent graduates to work with more experienced artists on new projects
- seek to widen the audience for the appreciation of the artworks
- develop new links with other organisations in the UK and overseas
- make funding applications to support the collaborative activity
- maintain a website to document all the work undertaken in the name of New British Art
The organisation grew from an informal meeting of artists over a number of years at the KODA Studios in the Grangetown area of Cardiff. The group was formalised as an artist led organisation in 2009. In 2010 the group was awarded a Stiwdio Safle grant towards Blue Bell Hangar, a large-scale collaborative sculpture and series of events that took place over two years. Other funders included the Centre for Fine Art Research at Cardiff School of Art & Design. The work was seen by a wide ranging audience, firstly at the former MoD hangar at St Athan which was kindly lent by the Welsh Government, and then at Cilyrynys, a former farm in West Wales, where a smaller group witnessed a further performance involving the artwork. The work was documented in a commissioned film and in a publication, with images and writing by the artists.
The group was then shortlisted, with funding from Arts Council of Wales, to represent Wales at the 2011 Venice Biennale with Sal Venezia, a site specific solar driven artwork designed to extract salt from the Venetian Lagoon to be deposited in a gallery space over the duration of the Biennale. The Science Museum in London was particularly interested in this project in relation to its long term exhibition around renewable energy.
Currently, there are several ongoing smaller collaborative projects between artists in the group. These are documented on the website.
Artists in the group are located across the UK with a base at Cilyrynys in Carmarthenshire where there is a large range of outbuildings and land usable for ambitious and experimental working. The group is thriving and its members are committed artists. The membership of the group is not static and new members are brought in with new collaborative projects.
If you would like to contact the group please email us newbritishart@googlemail.co.uk
Becky Whitmore 