Upcoming Events

Cutting Edge: Workshops on Collage, Day 2

Conference, Workshop – Ben Cranfield, Isabelle Mooney, Rachel Stratton, Samuel Bibby, Leila Nassereldein, Lisa Maddigan Newby

  • 14 October 2021
  • 2:00 – 4:30 pm
  • A workshop, as part of the multi-part conference programme 'Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now'
  • Online

The Cutting Edge: Workshops on Collage feature papers from early career researchers, who explore the art of collage from new and compelling perspectives. These sessions are hosted as Zoom meetings, allowing the attendees opportunities to engage in dynamic exchanges and group discussions. Numbers will be capped at a maximum of 50 participants for the workshops to enable more focused interactions using breakout rooms. Note, you do not need to be an academic to join the workshops, but should have a strong interest in collage and be willing to take an active part in discussing the papers.

14.00–14.10 Welcome by Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director, Paul Mellon Centre), Elena Crippa (Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate) and Rosie Ram (Visiting Lecturer, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art)

Panel 3

Chaired by Ben Cranfield (Senior Tutor, Curatorial Theory and History, Royal College of Arts)

14.10–14.20 Isabelle Mooney (PhD Candidate, University of St Andrews), ‘The Fragmented Maps by Nigel Henderson and John McHale’

14.20–14.30 Rachel Stratton (Art Historian and Curator), ‘Theo Crosby and the Graphic Arts’

14.30–14.50 Panel 3 discussion & questions

14.50–15.15 Breakout discussion 3

15.15–15.25 Break

Panel 4

Chaired by Samuel Bibby (Managing Editor, Art History journal)

15.25–15.35 Leila Nassereldein (Doctoral Researcher, Birkbeck, University of London ), ‘Humphrey Jennings, and the Collated Aesthetic as a Historiographic Practice’

15.25–15.45 Lisa Maddigan Newby (Independent Researcher), ‘Exhibiting “Ethnographic Collage” in London: From the ICA to the British Museum’

15.45–16.05 Panel 4 discussion & questions

16.05–16.30 Breakout discussion 4

16.30–16.35 Wrap-up

In collaboration with:


About the speakers

  • Ben Cranfield Headshot

    Ben Cranfield is Senior Tutor in Curatorial Theory and History on the Curating Contemporary Art programme, Royal College of Art. His research is focused on the relationship of the curatorial to notions of the contemporary and the archive, asking what it is to be ‘with’ one’s time, stemming from his ongoing work into the histories of art institutions, the theory of archives, and shifting ideas of art and culture in postwar Britain. Recent articles include, “On (Not Being with) Time (Queerly) in Post-War Britain”, Performance Research, October 2018; “Mind the Gap: Unfolding the proximities of the curatorial”, Performance Research, September 2017; “All play and no work? A ‘Ludistory’ of the curatorial as transitional object at the early ICA,” Tate Papers, Autumn 2014.

  • Headshot of Isabelle Mooney

    Isabelle Mooney is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, supported by a Carnegie Trust scholarship. Her thesis considers how artists in Britain navigated the apocalyptic landscape of bombed-out London as it underwent social reconstruction and urbanisation in the post-war period, placing the visual impetus of the bombsite at the centre of this discussion. Isabelle recently conducted research on post-war collages made by John McHale and Nigel Henderson at the Yale Center for British Art as a recipient of a Visiting Scholar Award.

  • Photo of Rachel Stratton sitting outside at a picnic table, arms crossed

    Rachel Stratton is an art historian and curator of British and American mid-twentieth century art who earned her PhD from the Courtauld in 2018. She completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art (2019/20) and is currently writing her book Grammars of Form: Art and the Crisis of Language in 1950s Britain, supported by a Paul Mellon Centre postdoctoral fellowship.

  • Head and shoulders photo of Samuel Bibby against a plain background

    Samuel Bibby is Managing Editor of the journal Art History. His current research focuses on the intersections between collage, magazines and historiography within the context of 1960s and 70s British art history. He is currently working on a virtual special issue of Art History entitled ‘“Ever Tied to the Fragment”: Art History and/as Collage’, as well as a book-length study, Art History as Things Seen: The New Art Historiography, which looks at art magazines and art-historical periodicals from 1970s Britain. Parts of this project have already appeared in British Art Studies and Art History.

  • Photo of Leila Nassereldein, standing in hallway

    Leila Nassereldein is a CHASE and AHRC-funded doctoral scholar in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, where she also teaches BA and MA students across the English and History of Art departments. With a BA in Politics, and an MA in Critical and Cultural Theory from the University of Leeds, Leila’s teaching specialisms include modernism and the avant-garde, modernity and the city, nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual thought, debates in art history, and the historical contextualisation of London literature. Leila’s PhD thesis addresses montage as a historiographic practice through correspondences in the interwar work of Walter Benjamin and Humphrey Jennings, critically examining a shared milieu of Surrealism between the two world wars. Alongside her academic work, Leila has developed, overseen and managed curatorial projects at Turner Contemporary, the British Library, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image, and the Peltz Gallery.

  • Headshot of Lisa Maddigan Newby standing in front of a plain background

    Lisa Maddigan Newby completed an AHRC-funded PhD in Art History at the University of East Anglia in 2017. The title of her doctoral thesis is ‘Assemblage in Practice: Artists, Ethnography and Display in Postwar London (1948–85)’. She is a research associate in the Art History department at UEA and is currently working on publications that develop the core themes of her PhD research. This work is supported by a research continuity fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She has worked as an associate tutor at UEA, as a museum curator and as a project manager for artist-led galleries and studios.