Snapshot 04: Making in Miniature
April 8 – May 31, 2024.
Reception Corridor, John Lennon Art and Design Building, Liverpool School of Art and Design.
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Throughout the history of modern art, the museum and the art market has prized the monumental: colossal history paintings and epic abstract canvases in oils, monumental sculptures cast in bronze and marble. Very small-scale sculptural works tend to be thought of as either models or maquettes instead of final works of art, whilst miniature paintings were once side-lined as personal tokens or fetish objects. Yet the small-scale work of art enables a complex politics of intimacy, and a different relationship with the viewer. Working in small scale invites a gentle and careful approach to making, or one that can enjoy making multiples and a kind of methodology grounded in repetition, accumulation, and seriality. It also challenges the conventions of art’s display: how do you hang a tiny painting, or exhibit a miniscule sculpture? To think small opens up the curatorial possibilities of assemblages, collections, constellations and series – whether working in drawing, painting, found objects or sculpture.
Over the course of a semester, 15 second year Fine Art students have embraced the idea of ‘Making in Miniature’. They have collectively thought about what it means to make a work of art on an intimate scale – a tiny sculpture you can hold in the palm of your hands, a painting the size of a postcard, or an artist’s book the smaller than a passport. They have developed a series of small-scale works – pencil drawings, inks, paintings, artist books and zines, photographs, collages, montages, found assemblages or sculptures. We have explored how scale effects a painting’s reception and how we experience it, we have worked independently, but also as a group to learn collectively from our adventures into the miniature, and end with this exhibition of works that we hope make you look closer and rethink the politics and poetics of scale in artistic practice, and everyday life.
The Making in Miniature Collective are:
Niamh Chisholm
Aoife Cranney
Rob Davenport
Amy Diment
Hala Hassanein
Lucy Henshaw
Maia Lees
August Maxwell
Cole Montaut
Hannah Morris
Sandra Mutukwa
Etain O’Donovan
Cameron Oldfield
Mia Ward-Gibbs
Melia Wright
Dr Sarah Edith James
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Snapshot is a permanent display programme of sequentially changing creative outputs. It provides an impression of each participant’s practice located in a liminal space in the School, where visitors only spend fleeting moments travelling to other spaces or waiting to enter classes.
The project is the result of an ongoing open call to all visiting researchers and practitioners, staff and students of all levels on all programmes at Liverpool School of Art and Design. It presents incomplete, transitory views of research-and-practice-in-progress; a window into a brief moment in time of a given academic year. The displays are selected on aesthetic criteria of how to best animate the space they occupy, projecting forwards in time the potential each work holds.
As the year progresses a living archive will develop on the concrete pillar next to each pair of vitrines, providing information about past and current displays.
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Developed by Dr James Schofield, Dr Hana Leaper and Christine Eyene (Exhibition Research Lab), and managed by students from the MA Exhibition Studies programme.
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Image credit: Lubaina Himid, Jelly Mould Pavilion, 2010, acrylic on jelly moulds, dimensions variable