Past Events

Space | Time | Life: a gathering

Conference

  • 9 February 2024
  • 11:00 – 6:00 pm
  • A free event, booking required
  • Wysing Arts Centre

This one-day gathering takes the LYC Museum & Art Gallery (the LYC, operating between 1972–1983) as inspiration and provocation to think about alternative infrastructures for artistic and creative practice – past, present and future – and what rural space, outside the perceived centre, can offer.

In a set of converted farm buildings bought by Li Yuan-chia from his friend, the painter Winifred Nicholson, the LYC offered gallery space, a children’s room, a library, performance areas, a printing press, a communal kitchen, and a garden. Taking place across the spaces at Wysing Arts Centre, this event will consist of conversations, workshops and interventions focused around:

  • Reimagining the rural
  • Creating belonging and community
  • Visionary spaces for coexistence
  • Legacies of the LYC project

This event is organised in collaboration by Wysing, Kettle’s Yard and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to coincide with the Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends exhibition. It is open to anyone interested in exploring these themes and ideas. The day will involve listening, conversation and participating in workshop activities.

Tickets and Transport

  • Tickets are free but numbers are limited. Registration essential.
  • Transport to and from Cambridge train station can be provided. To reserve a space on minibus/taxi ride from Cambridge train station to Wysing (outbound and/or return). Please purchase the necessary ‘Bus’ tickets in addition to your ‘Conference Ticket’.
  • If you sign-up for a 'Bus' ticket, we will be in touch with exact times for collection and pick-up. Please note we cannot refund individual taxi journeys made independently.
  • If you have any access requirements please contact us in advance by emailing [email protected]

Programme

11:00 Arrival and coffee
11:15 Welcome and introduction to the day
11:30 Performance by Aaron Tan, and a screening of selections from Li Yuan-chia’s films (Livestream option)
12:15 Communal meal, created by Sean Roy Parker. During lunch, we invite guests to share with their neighbour an object or memory connected to the rural
13:30 Conversation: Space / Time / Life: What the Rural Offers, with The Field, Bella Milroy and Ysanne Holt. (Livestream with closed captions available)
14:30

Choice of workshops:

1. Vessel making with Charwei Tsai, in the ceramics studio
2. A reading by Ama Josephine Budge, in the farmhouse
3. Drawing workshop with Anna Brownsted, in the Open Studio

15:30 Tea and flapjacks
16:00 Conversation: Beyond landscape: contemporary reflections on rurality, with Rafał Zajko, Dr Rosemary Shirley and Rosie Cooper (Livestream with closed captions available)
17:00 Closing performance by Aaron Tan (Livestream with closed captions available)

Listing image caption: Li Yuan-chia gardening in the grounds of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, 1970s. Image courtesy of Li Yuan-chia Archive, The University of Manchester Library