The Burton Art Gallery & Museum has secured
Arts Council England funding to commission eight artists and a film maker to make new works for the collection and to
develop new ways of using Bideford Black. Eight artists and a
film maker will explore new ways of working with a scarce pigment as part of a
project launched this week. ‘Bideford Black - The Next Generation’ is a Burton
Art Gallery project produced and curated in association with Flow Contemporary
Arts and Claire Gulliver.
The artists will be selected by open call
and the project partners are confident they will be both surprised and excited
by proposals from emerging and established artists from across the UK and
beyond. The new commissions will
join examples of existing works made with Bideford Black in the Burton’s
collection.
Warren Collum, Exhibitions Officer, said: “We
are grateful for the support of The Friends of the Museum who also contributed,
to ensure the budget is suitable to attract high-calibre artists to make art
with, or about, this unique and adaptable black pigment”.
The project connects the heritage of the
Bideford area with the use of its local pigment by artists past and present -
commissioning and documenting its creative possibilities. ‘Biddiblack’ is the local name for Bideford Black, a coal-like
mineral traditionally prized by artists for pigment and mined at Bideford until
1968. ‘Bideford Black: The Next Generation’ will reinterpret Bideford Black for
a contemporary audience, stretching its uses and creating fresh artworks for
Burton Art Gallery’s collection.
The specially commissioned film will document
the creative process - from the artist’s preliminary ideas, right through to
the final works - for exhibition in the Autumn of 2015. Devon-based artist
Peter Ward, who uses this unique pigment in his own artworks, conducted some
fascinating research about Bideford Black:
Running alongside seams of anthracite across North
Devon is a black clay-like material that was mined for 200 years in Bideford
for its uses as a strong black pigment. The unique ‘Mineral Black’, or
‘Biddiblack’ as it was known, was commercially produced for applications in the
boat building industry, for colouring rubber products, for camouflage on tanks
in WWII and was even bought by Max Factor for the production of mascara. The
mines were closed in 1968 when the production of cheaper oil-based blacks and
the depletion of the seam made the operation financially unviable, but many
locals still remember the ‘Paint Mines’ and have tales to tell of using the
paint or going into the now defunct mine shafts.
Follow the progress of the The Next
Generation project on this blog.
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