Carbon Slowly Turning: Movement, Energy, Landscape

On the occasion of the Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning exhibition, MK Gallery and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art are collaborating on their third conference.

The conference will take place Friday 6 May, 10.00–19.00 in the Sky Room of MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. The event will also be live-streamed to a digital audience.

Call for Expressions of Interest

This conference is imagined as a conversation with the exhibition, using it as a point of departure. At times, Pollard’s work will be directly referenced and, at others, ideas and strands of dialogue will emerge and escape from it. We are interested in thinking about movement, and the connections between the histories of art, energy, body cultures, landscape, geology and physiological aesthetics, both historically and in the present. The movement of the body in space and through time has preoccupied Pollard across her career, whether she is working with photography, kinetic sculpture or ceramics. Bodies, both real and metaphorical, are perpetually set in motion – twisting, turning, bowing, walking, dancing, sweating, punching – engaging with ideas and questions about ecology, temporality, race and gender as they move across the landscape.

Ideas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Kinetic movement: art object, energy and the body
• Carbon slowly turning: the body, landscape and deep time
• Edgelands, wastelands, pastoral lands: transitional and in-between spaces
• Abstraction and kinesthetic sensibilities
• How these ideas are reflected through experimental photographic practice

We invite expressions of interest to be involved in this conference. Please send an email including your name, institutional affiliation (if any) and a text of no more than 200 words expressing why you would like to be involved and the format you imagine your involvement might take (for example an illustrated talk, a gallery talk in front of a work, a spoken word response, a performance or another format) to [email protected] by noon on Monday 14 March.

About the Exhibition Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning, 12 March – 29 May 2022.

“Ingrid Pollard’s practice has long been focused on the human body, astrophysics and geology, and in particular geology in the formation of the stars and planets. The title of this project – Carbon Slowly Turning – invites us to reflect on geological time in relation to human time. On the one hand, the millennia in which carbon, rock and other natural materials are made and, on the other, the brevity of human existence by comparison and the affecting nature of geology on the human form. A number of Pollard’s works reflect on the cyclical nature of history and human experience, where everything is subject to change, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of years, at other times in the blink of an eye.” — Gilane Tawadros, Exhibition Curator.

This major survey of Guyanese-born British artist and photographer, Ingrid Pollard, is the first exhibition to fully explore Pollard’s pioneering and experimental practice, from the 1980s to the present day.

Ingrid Pollard is renowned for using photography as social practice, working with portrait and landscape photography to question our relationship with the natural world and interrogate social constructs such as Britishness, race, sexuality and identity. Working across a remarkable variety of techniques, from photography, printmaking, drawing and installation, to artist’s books, video, audio and sculpture, Pollard’s practice combines meticulous research and experimental creative processes to make art that is at once deeply personal and socially engaged.

The exhibition is curated by Gilane Tawadros in collaboration with the artist and has been organised by MK Gallery with Turner Contemporary.

Winner of the Freelands Award 2020 Exhibition supported by Freelands Foundation. Supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Association for Art History.