Teacher Resource Notes – KS1 & KS2 Summer Season 14 May – 25 September 2011 Martin Creed / Fischli and Weiss / Naum Gabo / Lucio Fontana / Anri Sala / Margaret Mellis / Agnes Martin / Roman Ondák / These notes are designed to support teachers and students as they explore and engage with the art work. As well as factual information they provide starting points for discussion, ideas for simple practical activities and suggestions for extended work that could stem from a gallery visit. To book a gallery visit for your group call 01736 796226 or email [email protected] . Season overview This season Tate St Ives uses the gallery to display eclectic work from eight different artists, featuring art from the Tate Collection as well as loans of contemporary international work. Walking through the galleries provides an opportunity to experience work which responds to the architectural spaces, sometimes playfully, and to connect themes of light, structure and space in a mix of various art practices and media. The Heron Mall and Lower Gallery 2 displays work by Martin Creed (b1968), the 2001 Turner Prize winner. Text, light and latex balloons transform the gallery spaces, inviting surprise and visitor participation. Also in the Heron Mall three monitors display thousands of photographs by the artistic partnership of Peter Fischli (b1952) and David Weiss (b1946), exploring travel and the exotic as well as the everyday reality of human life and its combination of ordinariness, humour and drama. Gallery 1 displays Prototypes for Sculpture , exploring the working processes of Naum Gabo (1890 –1977) in drawings and maquettes, as well as final sculptures. Gabo was a Russian exile who came to Carbis Bay in 1939; his constructivist work had a profound influence on artists in St Ives, especially Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Terracotta and ceramic sculptures and paintings by the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) are shown in Upper Gallery 2. These include some buchi (‘holes’) works, where the artist punctures through the materials in order to explore variations of space and time. The video Ghost Games by Albanian artist Anri Sala (b1974) is shown in the Apse. Ghost crabs appear in beams of torch light on a night time beach, as if participants in a playful game; but the video also invite other personal responses. Gallery 3 displays early collages, made in St Ives, and later assemblages by Margaret Mellis. Visitors can compare the constructivist influences of Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson in St Ives with Mellis’s later intuitive work, exploring colour in driftwood assemblages. Gallery 4 shows another in the series of ARTIST ROOMS at Tate St Ives: the minimalist, delicate but powerful works of Canadian artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Martin is often identified with American minimalists like Donald Judd, but she related her own grid-based work to Expressionism and the influence of Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman. She lived and worked in New York in the 1960s and also responded strongly to the space and simplicity of New Mexico. The work in Gallery 5 will be made as the summer season progresses and all visitors are invited to participate in its process, performance and making. Roman Ondák (b1966) is a Slovakian installation and performance artist and in Measuring the Universe 2007 he changes the empty white gallery space by recording physical traces of visitors, marking their heights, names and dates around the walls. Ways of Looking: ideas for KS1-2 groups Listening to others/responding personally/sensory experiences A huge amount of information can be revealed just by asking the question 'what do you see?’. Once a few ideas are circulating this often cascades into very imaginative and perceptive ways of viewing the work. Asking 'why do you say that?' invites further consideration and sharing of ideas from students. What word(s) does the work make you think about? Have you seen anything like this before? What do the titles tell you? What does the colour make you think about? Visual experience/what can you see?/traditional and new media What materials and processes has the artist used to make the work? Have you seen this material in art before? Is the work made in traditional or new materials? What is it? (painting, sculpture, drawing, collage etc) How is it displayed? What space does it occupy and how does it relate to other work in the exhibition? What is the scale of the artwork and how does this affect our relationship to it? Is the work made to be permanent? Communicating ideas and meaning Is it about real life? Is there a story or narrative in the work? Does it relate to contemporary life? Does the title affect the meaning of the work? Art in context/cultures/times. Local/national/global Is the work about a particular place? Who is the artist? Is it important to know who created the work? Does the artist’s background inform the work? Does the work connect to art from other times and cultures? Has the artist reinvented art from other times and cultures? Heron Mall Fischli and Weiss Visible World 1997 Video installation Tate. © The artists and Matthew Marks Gallery New York Three monitors display thousands of images in a slide-show providing a chronological account of travels the artists have made. These evoke familiar tourist photographs mixed with individual responses to the unexpected splendour of the world. Almost everything, from all over the world Have you travelled to any of these places as a tourist? Do you recognise any images? Which photographs seem really ordinary and about everyday life and which would you consider exotic or beautiful? Compressing time Can you imagine how long it took to take all these photographs? How do you think the artists travelled to these places? Think about the carbon footprint of making this work from all these journeys. Sketch book responses Make quick sketches about your favourite photographs in the slide-show and drawings about places you have visited, or where you’d like to go. Back to back descriptions Stand with a partner who has their back to you and try to describe a photograph so your partner can draw it in their sketchbook. Gallery 1 Naum Gabo Model for ‘Spheric Theme’ c.1937 Tate © Nina and Graham Williams The modernist sculptor Naum Gabo (1890-1977) lived in Carbis Bay (1939-46) and it was in St Ives that he began first to use nylon filament in his work. This gallery displays small models, sketches, drawings and templates as well as finished sculptures, providing an insight into Gabo's hands-on working process. Experiments in simple materials developed into complex finished sculptures in glass, metal and the new plastics (some of which proved to be quite unstable). Gabo sometimes produced multiple versions of sculptures, using different materials, exploring themes of space and time. You can view films about Naum Gabo in the Studio – access via the lift at the end of gallery one. Hand-made Compare the models with the finished sculptures; do you think the sculptures are hand-made or completed with the help of machines or technology? Look closely at the notches in the threaded works; can you see any unevenness? How would you calculate where to make the holes? Carving/constuction Kinetic Stone Carving 1936-44 was Gabo’s first pure carving. He started working on this in London in 1936 and completed it in Cornwall. He admired the work of Barbara Hepworth. What do you think are the main differences between the carvings and the constructions? Discuss how Naum Gabo would have made his carved sculptures in stone compared to those constructed in man-made plastic. Mathematics in nature Gabo was interested in mathematics and engineering, but also in shapes and forms in nature. Does the work remind you of anything you have seen before in nature, like shells or bones perhaps? Doodles in space Without looking at your sketchbook draw a continuous curving, criss- crossing line. Gaze at your drawing for a while and see if you can find a sculpture within it, influenced by the work of Gabo. Draw over the lines, using a different colour if you want, to make a sculptural drawing. When you return to school you could develop this drawing into a sculpture using wire. Upper Gallery 2 Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale, Attesa 1960 Coutesy Robilant + Voena © Fondazione Lucio Fontana The Space Age of the 1950s and 1960s had a great impact on the work of Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), an Argentinean artist who worked in Italy. In this new era his artistic vision focussed on time, matter and space, and he responded with gestures that produced the hole and the cut (the buchi and the tagli ). Fontana worked with paper and canvas, as well as terracotta, ceramic and bronze. Space eggs Why do you think Fontana has chosen egg shapes for his sculpture? Invent a story about what made the holes in these eggs and what emerged from them. Imagine the planet where they might have been found and make drawings about your ideas. Use these drawings later to make models using recycled materials. Stars like holes in the sky Have you ever looked up at night and imagined the stars are holes in the sky? Look around the display and see if any work reminds you of stars and planets. Interplanetary space travel In the 1950s and 1960s Fontana thought about new technologies and the possibilities of space travel, long before films like Star Wars. Discuss your ideas about space travel and create a mind map recording these thoughts – use colour, symbols and drawings on the mind map.