Artists are makers of things but what is revealed about their creative lives by the everyday items and treasured possessions that surround and consume them at home or in the studio? How do things mediate and even muddle the realms of the domestic, professional and spiritual? These are some of the questions that authors Katie Scott and Hannah Williams hope to explore with contemporary artists Cornelia Parker and Christopher Le Brun following the recent publication of Artists’ Things: Lost Property (Getty, 2024), a book about the material culture of artists in eighteenth-century France. Scott and Williams’s study of various items begged, borrowed, loaned and owned by artists in Paris 300 years ago is the catalyst now for their conversation with Parker and Le Brun – each celebrated for the ways in which their own art responds to the histories underpinning the world about them. We will talk about the objects they themselves own and are possessed by, and how these things relate to their practice and preoccupations as artists at work today.
Sir Christopher Le Brun PPRA is one of the leading British painters of his generation. He was President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2011 to 2019 for which and other services to the visual Arts he was Knighted in 2021. He makes both figurative and abstract work in painting, sculpture, watercolour and print. His pictures are notable for their layered, complex and dazzling surfaces that he describes as primary responses to the act of painting. The mastery of touch and colour that he brings to his work is informed by a profound knowledge and understanding of art history and the wider artistic field. The prevailing intention of his work is to intuit the boundaries of art, to feel them out, freeing it from constraint. His works are in many collections worldwide and in London at the British Museum, Courtauld Gallery, Tate Gallery, and Victoria & Albert Museum. His work is currently on view at Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill.
Cornelia Parker CBE RA was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997 and is one of the most celebrated artists active today. In 2022 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the Arts and awarded an honorary fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She works across sculpture, installation, embroidery, drawing, photography and film to investigate processes of transformation and suspension and to explore the often-destructive times in which we live. To demonstrate the importance of process, she frequently transforms found objects by using seemingly violent techniques such as shooting, exploding, squashing, cutting and burning. Through these actions she both physically alters the object and becomes active herself in the development of its history. Parker was the UK’s official Election Artist for the 2017 general election and made several artworks now in The Parliamentary Art Collection. In 2023 Parker was commissioned by the Government Art Collection to create works in response to Coronation of King Charles III. Her works are in many collections worldwide, and in London, The British Museum, Tate and the V&A.
Prof Katie Scott FBA is Professor Emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her fields of research are 17th and 18th century French art and architecture, and print and intellectual property. She is the author of The Rococo Interior (Yale University Press, 1996) and Becoming Property (Yale University Press, 2019). She is currently working on an art history of eighteenth-century Paris.
Dr Hannah Williams is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London. She is a specialist in French visual and material culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Her research focuses on artistic communities, local and global histories of the Paris art world, and the social lives of objects. She is the author of Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Routledge, 2015), awarded the Prix Marianne Roland Michel, and has published widely in journals including Art History, French History, Oxford Art Journal, and Urban History. She led the creation of the digital mapping project Artists in Paris: Mapping the Eighteenth-Century Art World (www.artistsinparis.org) and is a founding editor of Journal18. She is currently writing a book on art and religion in eighteenth-century Paris and researching a project on art-world ties to French colonies in the Caribbean.
