| Description | Between 1984 and 1995 Drew Gallery, Canterbury instigated a series of ground breaking temporary art exhibitions, installations in various locations around the city of Canterbury, creating new ways of working and experiencing artists' work. Curated and commissioned by Sandra Drew these interactions offered people the opportunity to see cutting edge work, from across Britain and the world, in a democratic outside the static gallery situation, in Kent.
The work was mostly made on site throughout the city of Canterbury, with the artists working in situ through the three week duration of the Canterbury Festival. By focusing on the process of making the work, providing the support required by the artists to function in unusual and at time difficult situations, and interacting with the fabric of a small cathedral city, it's streets, buildings and population, a particular exhibition model was developed, unprecedented at that time. The selected artists were working with a range of very different materials - Plasticine, match sticks and magazines, and also with video, photography and performance, all common today but different from the stone and metal sculptures previously exhibited in the public realm.
This body of work has significant relevance, particularly to Canterbury and East Kent, as it broke new ground and was the forerunner to more recent initiatives such as Artangel, Stour Valley Arts, Whitstable Biennale and the Folkestone Triennial. On extremely low budgets, it supported artists in the early stages of their careers, some of whom are now important figures in contemporary British art.
The Drew Gallery Projects and Stour Valley Arts reflect the legacy of arts development and cultural regeneration in East Kent.
The exhibitions in The Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury and Brewery Tap UCA Project Space, Folkestone during 2018 and Southwark Park Galleries in 2019 together with the accompanying publication, ‘From the Kitchen Table: Drew Gallery Projects 1984-90’ celebrate Sandra Drew's visionary legacy to a whole new generation, a career that has remained modestly observed and yet passionately championed by those artists, students and communities who directly benefited from Drew's revolutionary curatorial spirit during the 80s and beyond.
The archive compromises of a range of archive material such as posters, brochures, reviews and photographic documentation from 1984-1995.
The Drew Gallery Projects collection is kept longside the Herbert Read Gallery Records in the study room at Canterbury.
Drew Gallery Project images, can be found on https://vads.ac.uk/digital/collection/DGP
|