Last December, I was awarded a one-year Goodison Fellowship to research the Artists’ Lives oral history archive, a collection of 400 interviews with British art-world figures, as part of National Life Stories – a project housed in the British Library, London.
I first encountered it while working on my book about the artist Sandra Blow in 2003-04, and have returned regularly for other books and projects. There is no research resource quite like it. In thousands of hours of recordings, its subjects move constantly between professional matters and personal themes – childhood memories, relationships, the texture of daily life.
My research proposal focused on two outcomes: a book that’s a work in progress and the recent exhibition (it ended on 20 July) at The Lightbox in Woking – In Their Own Words: Artists’ Voices from The Ingram Collection – in which extracts from the Artists’ Lives oral history recordings acted as audio interpretation.
I’m interested in the way text and audio work together – the interplay between words, voices, sounds and objects in a particular space. Hearing artists’ voices while you look at their work brings a human dimension to the experience.
During my research, there have been many moments of unforeseen insight, such as the sculptor Ralph Brown recalling his attempt, aged eight, to carve a snowman in the form of a female nude.
A surprising discovery was that the social historian Paul Thompson, a co-founder of National Life Stories, grew up in Woking and was introduced to art by a teacher who happened to be a friend of Henry Moore. Thompson persuaded his father to buy a Moore sculpture, which years later was sold to provide start-up funding for National Life Stories.
Michael Bird is a freelance author, art historian and curator
I first encountered it while working on my book about the artist Sandra Blow in 2003-04, and have returned regularly for other books and projects. There is no research resource quite like it. In thousands of hours of recordings, its subjects move constantly between professional matters and personal themes – childhood memories, relationships, the texture of daily life.
My research proposal focused on two outcomes: a book that’s a work in progress and the recent exhibition (it ended on 20 July) at The Lightbox in Woking – In Their Own Words: Artists’ Voices from The Ingram Collection – in which extracts from the Artists’ Lives oral history recordings acted as audio interpretation.
I’m interested in the way text and audio work together – the interplay between words, voices, sounds and objects in a particular space. Hearing artists’ voices while you look at their work brings a human dimension to the experience.
During my research, there have been many moments of unforeseen insight, such as the sculptor Ralph Brown recalling his attempt, aged eight, to carve a snowman in the form of a female nude.
A surprising discovery was that the social historian Paul Thompson, a co-founder of National Life Stories, grew up in Woking and was introduced to art by a teacher who happened to be a friend of Henry Moore. Thompson persuaded his father to buy a Moore sculpture, which years later was sold to provide start-up funding for National Life Stories.
Michael Bird is a freelance author, art historian and curator
