Judith King discusses her work as Co-director of Arts and Heritage

This week's studio seminar was given by Judith King, Artistic Director and contemporary art curator, initiating and devising projects and exhibitions usually for heritage organisations.

Judith began working for English Heritage in 1995, as part of a curatorial panel for Living at Belsay, refurnishing an historic house with contemporary design. Her role included finding artists, managing thirteen new contemporary design commissions and co-ordinating the loan of over sixty smaller works from artists and designers.

From being part of a curatorial panel to curating major projects for Belsay as an individual, Judith has brought together artists, designers, performers architects and fashion designers in six major commissioning exhibitions for Belsay Hall Castle and Gardens.

The approach is to address and challenge audience expectations and preconceptions by producing contemporary projects that are imaginative, engaging and encourage further investigation into context and history.

Ron Mueck

She talked most about the project, ExtraOrdinary Measures at Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens which were temporarily transformed by contemporary artists.

Responding to this unique historic setting, six artists were commissioned to make new work that reflected upon scale. Curated by Judith King and project managed by Culture Creative, this sixth project at Belsay included new commissions by Ron Mueck, Mat Collishaw, Mariele Neudecker, street artist Slinkachu, Tessa Farmer and Freddie Robins.


Tessa Farmer


She then compared this experience of working on individual self-initiated projects such as The Great Boxing Booth Revival, 2012, which give her more control.

The Great Boxing Booth Revival was a contemporary boxing booth and cultural programme travelling to Northumbrian and Cumbrian fairs and fetes in 2012.

The Great Boxing Booth Revival was a Cultural Olympiad project initiated and co-curated with Harry Pearson, award winning sports journalist and writer.

In-House Films have produced three videos of the performances; The Great Boxing Booth Revival, BALTIC, County Fair and Wagon Tour.

Torsten Lauschmann Artist Talk

This week's visiting artist was Torsten Lauschmann, and I was one of the students who was chairing the seminar that took place after the talk.

Here are some of my thoughts in relation to / as a result of looking at Torsten's work

- Lauschmann often exhibits a work that he thinks is unfinished, and will reshow the work in different exhibitions, sometimes it getting closer to being finished. An exhibition is an opportunity to develop the work and each exhibition marks a different stage in its development.

- His work has been described as "too fast to be photography, too slow to be film"

- Lauschmann thinks that interactive art seems too much like a game

- Interested in failure

"I didn't fail, I just found out how it doesn't work"

Having heard Lauschmann explain the setup of certain works within his artist talk, I began to question how well his website represents his work. For example, on his website, 'Dead man's switch' is a video of a candle. However, when discussed in the artist talk, Lauschmann explained that every time the candle in the video was blown out, the lights in the gallery would come on, thus illuminating the audience and surroundings. In this way, the physical space plays its part in the artwork, yet online, one would not understand how it is actually exhibited. It brought into question the nature of how to document certain works.

Likewise, some artworks work well on the computer screen, but other works may not suit this - how does an artist frame the artwork and the documentation?

For more information about Torsten Lauschmann, visit

http://www.torstenlauschmann.com