Annual research residency from 2013-2015, in partnership with the Foundling Museum

Tom Railton's closing event at the Foundling Museum in 2015/16
Tom Railton’s closing event at the Foundling Museum in 2015/16

The award

Successful applicants received:

  • A bursary of £3,000 to undertake a period of research at the Foundling Museum
  • Access to parts of the Foundling Museum’s collections and curators
  • Support in presenting their research and work in a public facing event

The artists

2013: Lucy Cash

Since 2001 Lucy Cash’s practice has encompassed performance, film and visual art. Her background in collaborative performance‐making informs her approach to the work she now makes in different media and she continues to explore unconventional forms of collaboration with many different kinds of people and at different points in her process. Over the period of the residency, Cash produced a blog about her experiences and approach to engaging with the Museum’s Collection, staff and visitors.

On completing her residency Cash invited writer Deborah Levy to join her in conversation about her research at the museum, notebooks, the slipperiness of time, the politics of motherhood and learning how to interrupt.

2014: Tom Railton

The 2014 Foundling Residency was awarded to Tom Railton. Born in Coventry, Railton studied and worked in Leeds until moving to London to take his Postgraduate Diploma at Chelsea College of Arts in 2011. Awarded the Patrick Caulfield Scholarship for MA Fine Art study, he graduated with Distinction the following year, and was awarded the 3rd annual GAM Gilbert de Botton Art Prize. To find out more about the work Tom undertook at the Museum visit his blog.

To mark the end of his residency Tom Railton hosted an evening of clay, play and blue-sky thinking at the Foundling Museum to mark the end his residency there. Based on research carried out in residence at the museum since November last year, the event commemorated the 273rd anniversary of the date the first child was admitted to Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital. An invited audience took part in a series of talks, games and discussions, with the opportunity to take home a limited-edition artwork made entirely on the night itself.

2015: Pavilion (Sophie Yetton & Gabriel Birch)

Pavilion is the collaborative artist duo Sophie Yetton and Gabriel Birch, based in south east London. Their work uses a variety of media to expose a dialogue between the fiction and function of art. Previous work has manifested itself as small architectures for the gallery that operate simultaneously as installation and as display devices for other art works. They worked on a project called The Archive Series, adopting collage and video montage to explore re-imagined mythologies for existing collections, which they will develop and explore during their time as artists in residence at The Foundling Museum.

Interviews

In a series of conversations, Artquest’s Nick Kaplony, Pavilion and Alison Duke, the Foundling Museum’s head of collections, talked about the residency, making applications to opportunities, why artists engage with museums, the work made during the residency and the histories that Pavilion discovered hidden in the Museum’s architecture.

A final piece of audio was made to record the final closing event, a talk between Pavilion and Marianne Mulvey, curator of public programmes at the Tate, exploring how the framing of Museum collections presents particular historical narratives and the dynamics of power that exist between the institution and audience.