Drawing Discussion: Octogenarian Dance - Yvonne Crossley with Anita Taylor

A recording of an online Drawing Discussion, held on Wednesday 8 November 2023, with Yvonne Crossley and Anita Taylor in association with the exhibition, Octogenarian Dance, at Drawing Projects UK.
The solo exhibition, Octogenarian Dance, by Yvonne Crossley RWA ran from 23 September to 18 November 2023. Octogenarian Dance is a recent body of work that both celebrates the positive elements of old age and recognises the stigma inherent in the “catastrophe” of approaching the later years of life, by an artist who is unashamedly physically old and long in life-story herself. As we age, a multiplicity of selves proliferates, over and through time. Ageing “is a multiple, ambiguous, and contradictory process, which provides us - continuously and simultaneously - with images of past, present, lost, embodied and imagined selves” (Helen Moglen, 2008 Studies in Gender and Sexuality). These possibilities result in a dislocation for the ageing self, residing in the tensions between the person in the mirror, the person in our minds at different points in time, and the body that others see. The pieces brought together in the exhibition Octogenarian Dance focus on this aspect of the ageing body in modern society, attentive to the way in which age, life, and memory intersect.
Until recently Crossley’s work has been formed spatially within the traditional rectangle. This new work, however, looks at elements of human form in a departure from two-dimensional boundary constraints - drawn, cut, and redrawn components, derived mainly from the body but including other elements of the narrative, can thus float free from the “edge” into an existence which allows for a new range of readings and meanings. In this assembly of body parts there are implications of the broken-but-mended, and of interchangeability, constrained movement, the votive, the ritualistic and the memorialised.
Yvonne Crossley was born in Yorkshire in 1942, and studied painting at Goldsmith’s College School of Art. She first exhibited in The Young Contemporaries (selected by Richard Hamilton, Bryan Robertson and Leslie Waddington) at the Tate Gallery, London. Subsequently she participated in many group and open exhibitions including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Artist As Selector at the Jerwood Gallery, the Derwent Art Prize and The Sunday Times Watercolour Open and has held solo exhibitions in galleries across the UK including the Ikon Gallery - Birmingham, The Laing Gallery - Newcastle upon Tyne, The Midland Group Gallery - Nottingham, Battersea Arts Centre - London, The Academicians Gallery - Royal West of England Academy - Bristol, and Chelsea Arts Club. She was elected as an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 2014 serving as both an elected Council member for 6 years and Trustee for 4 years.
Yvonne Crossley worked as an art educator in Higher Education at a range of institutions including Winchester School of Art, Southampton Institute, University of Portsmouth, Epsom School of Art and Wimbledon School of Art. Her awards include an Italian Government Bursary, a Brazilian Government Scholarship and a DAAD Post-Graduate Research Grant. She completed her PhD, ‘Marking Times - Proposals for the Funereal Artefacts for Four Women’, culminating in a solo exhibition at The Picker Gallery, London in 2001. In 2004 she left her post as Professor and Vice-Principal (Resources) at Wimbledon School of Art to set up The Drawing Gallery in Central London - the first gallery in the UK to focus entirely on contemporary drawing. The gallery has, since opening, represented a significant number of international artists and notable emerging British artists. Clients included international museums and galleries as well as corporate and private collectors. In 2007 she moved to mid-Wales, initially sharing her time between her studio practice and running The Drawing Gallery in Herefordshire, situated nine miles west of Ludlow. Since 2015 she has focussed solely upon her own practice.
Anita Taylor is a practicing artist, a Professor, and Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee. She is the founding director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (1994-current) and Drawing Projects UK, a public-facing initiative dedicated to drawing (since 2009). After graduating from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art (1987) she became artist-in-residence at Durham Cathedral (1987-88), then Cheltenham Fellow in Painting (1988-89). Academic leadership roles have included: Executive Dean, Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University; director and CEO, National Art School, Sydney, Australia; Dean, Wimbledon College of Art and Director of The Centre for Drawing, University of the Arts London; Vice Principal, Wimbledon School of Art. She exhibits her work nationally and internationally, and her drawings and paintings are held in a number of public collections.
Please note that this is a Zoom recording of a live event.