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flowers

Ryan, 9, describing 'Vexilla Regis', 1948, by David Jones


Children
Transcript
And then there's this big huge painting of like a deep dark forest and the colours are all dull and you can look at the flowers, just at the bottom and they are all dead and in the sky looks like there's a mist, looks like a forgotten world. Forgotten, no-one needs any more, no-one wants. It's like a dark forest with ancient creatures. I think the person who painted this must have had a dream or something. Mist in the sky, full moon, the burning sun and the dead flowers and in the distance there is a little animal. I'm not sure if it’s a deer, I'm going to have a closer look now. Looks like a unicorn and it looks like no-one wants to live there any more, no-one wants to explore.

Texas, 9, and Ellie, 9, discussing the large Buddha in the house extension


Children
Transcript
Hello I'm Texas, I'm 9 years old. I'm looking at a sculpture that is a bit weird to the other ones, it's a person sitting down and holding a flower in its hand and it's on a stand so it don't fall down. It looks like it's like praying and it’s somewhere quiet. I like it because it's like a person in it's own time, thinking. I think it's sitting on a special chair um because if you look round it you can see the back of the chair, the front of the chair, but the chair doesn't have any legs and it's on a wooden stand and its ears look weird and it's got a special thing on its head.

Role of the curator, 1977-1983


Jeremy Lewison
Transcript
As Paul [Clough] will have told you, on Thursday mornings we went down before 9 o'clock to the WI stall to buy flowers and we'd do all the flower arrangements and it had to be those, kind of, cottage flowers, it wasn't formal, it was cottage flowers which went with the cottage garden, if you like. So, obviously a lot of my time was spent organising exhibitions. I would organise the show, I would drive the van to collect the works of art, I would organise the insurance, I would paint the walls of the gallery, I would sweep the floors, hang every work of art, with my assistants obviously. I drove as far afield as St Just in Cornwall to collect works for an exhibition and back again. It was exhausting actually. I can remember taking works by Eric Gill back after an Eric Gill exhibition that we had. I dropped off some works at the Tate Gallery, then I drove onto Weymouth, where I dropped off something else, then I went on to Totnes in Devon - the exhibition had been organised by the Dartington - dropped off some things there, I was with Mike Tooby at the time, then we went on to St Just to collect works by Karl Veschke for the next exhibition and we were back within two days. Painted the gallery, hung the show and it opened by... so the whole thing took place over seven days. We'd shut an exhibition on a Sunday, we'd strike it on a Monday, we'd deliver it all back on the Tuesday, collect the next stuff Tuesday or Wednesday, we'd be back in the gallery Thursday, hang it, off we went, and we did everything.