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Eric Gill

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.