Goldmark 32, 2024

As you might have guessed from the front cover of this current issue, this time of year has caught the Goldmark Gallery in a peculiar moment of reflection. Spring usually anticipates things to look forward to, and there are plenty here in our exhibition calendar: potter Mike Dodd’s seventh exhibition at the gallery, and Richard James’ third showing of his extraordinary assembled relics, both scheduled for the coming months. But our Spring magazine is marked also by reviews of ongoing legacies. Norman Ackroyd, Clive Bowen, and John Farrington – three very different artists – have each left their mark in singular ways in their chosen fields. At the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik galleries, Julian Freeman finds sobering discussion of conflicts past and present. And with the celebration this year of Eduardo Paolozzi’s centenary, what better time to cast our eye back to the ‘electric garden’ of his art, exploding with kitsch and colour, as the days seem to lighten.

CONTRIBUTORS

Norman Ackroyd CBE RA is a celebrated etcher and Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, known especially for his use of aquatint and his unusual method of plein air etching. An alumnus of Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, where he studied under Julian Trevelyan, Ackroyd emerged as a landscape artist with a penchant for brooding land and seascapes. He is currently in the process of establishing an eponymous foundation with his daughter, the composer Poppy Ackroyd, to help support students embarking on creative careers.

Alun Graves is Senior Curator of Ceramics and Glass, 1900-now, at the Victorian and Albert Museum, London. He has written widely on 20th and 21st century British ceramics and sculpture, contributing to a variety of journals, collected papers and exhibition catalogues. In 2023 he authored Studio Ceramics (Thames & Hudson), an extensive visual catalogue of British studio pottery held in the V&A collection.

Dr Julian Freeman is a Sussex-based Art Historian and Gallery Educator at the Courtauld Gallery, London. An author, curator and lecturer, he has written about art for many years, as a critic and reviewer with The Art Book and as author of universally acclaimed books including British Art: A Walk Round the Rusty Pier (2006). In 2021 he authored the exhibition catalogue for Goldmark’s major Anthony Gross retrospective, and he has contributed three essays on Gross’ life and work for a forthcoming Goldmark publication on the artist.

Robert Macfarlane is a renowned writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Best known for his nature writing – from rivers, trees, mountains and pilgrim passages to the disappearing language of the natural world – his celebrated works include The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017) and Underland (2019). In 2017 he received The E. M. Forster Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.