Exhibition - Katie Schwab: A Working Building

About us

'A Working Building' – a new solo exhibition from acclaimed London artist Katie Schwab comes to Plymouth

A new exhibition in The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art explores local design histories and collective workforces in relation to contemporary concerns around reused and scrap materials

Artist Katie Schwab worked on projects at London's Serpentine Galleries and Tate St Ives, before embarking on an 18-month residency at Plymouth College of Art, where she moved through the open studios, working with practicing artists, staff and students to learn practical craft skills in glassblowing, textiles, animation and 3D printing.

The results, which take the form of an installation of stitched, tufted and dyed textiles, wallpaper, furniture, moving image works and wall panels, drawing on the bright colours, bold shapes and abstract forms of twentieth-century modern design, can be seen in The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art from 31 January until 16 March 2019.

Evolving through an 18-month Design Residency at Plymouth College of Art, research for this show has centred around recreational, educational and civic designs in Plymouth, alongside fabrics produced by the early twentieth-century Cryséde textile factory in St Ives. Cryséde manufactured wood-block printed silk and linen fabrics from their factory on Island Road, with the factory offering the first industrial employment for women in the area.

About the artist:

Katie Schwab lives and works in London. Her practice interweaves personal, social, and craft-based histories, often drawing from traditions of living, making and working collectively. Spanning exhibition-making, design commissions, printed resources and workshops, she works across arts, learning and community contexts to explore references to modern design, handcrafts and radical pedagogies. Her work has been described by Art Review as "A quiet call to arms. In its nonetheless insistent way, it embodies a proposition for how contemporary art might revive creative practices of the past."

Events in the Gallery:

Katie Schwab: Exhibition Opening - Wednesday 30 January, 5pm to 7pm

Join us for a drink and a chance to view Katie's exhibition which has been formed by the artist visiting and working in residence at the College over an 18 month period.

Owen Hatherley: Vision, Space and Equality: Plymouth and the Planned City - Wednesday 27 February, 5.30pm to 6.30pm

There are many cities in Britain that were heavily replanned and redesigned after war damage, but in few of them were the changes so sweeping as in Plymouth. Nor were any so classical, with the new city on a clear symmetrical axis to the sea, lined by stone-clad and monumental buildings, making this Britain's only real cousin to the grandiose neoclassical rebuildings of devastated continental cities like Le Havre, East Berlin, Warsaw or Minsk. This talk will compare Plymouth with these contemporaries, both in the way it was replanned, and in the way these cities function now - from preservation to destruction, from renovation to dilapidation, from coherence to messiness, from mainstream commercial thoroughfares to underground cult spaces. Through this, we might get some sense of what Plymouth could do to build on, rather than destroy, this dramatic legacy

Katie Schwab: Artist Talk - Wednesday 6 March, 5.30pm to 6.30pm

Join us for an artist talk by Katie Schwab who will discuss her 18 month long residency at the college and resulting exhibition.