Closing Remarks by Penelope Curtis
I want to say thank you to Sarat firstly, for his very graceful summing up, it’s a tall order to sum up at 4.30 after having only just heard the papers, so we’re very grateful to you and also particularly because you perhaps were trying to resist summing up, you were talking about the singularity and disparate quality of the different papers, so thank you for summing up something that maybe didn’t want to be summed up too much.
I suppose, wearing my sculpture hat, I feel that some common strands certainly emerged in terms of the sculptural language; we saw that again and again in terms of how sculpture can replicate and reproduce, it can insert real objects into sensitive places. The question of material wear and how material shows age and signs of where it’s come from and how it can be re-used, and the question of drama and performance, and the way that objects can be part of that staging – I think all those things came together repeatedly through the day and we’re very very grateful of course to the artists for six excellent presentations, and I think everyone here must feel with me that we couldn’t have been luckier in the artists who spoke.
But I also want to say thank you to the curators who chose them, because they were six good choices, I think. So thank you Celina and Stephen and Martina for making what was such a nice selection in terms of the way they worked together. I hope that we in our institutional contexts, Henry Moore Institute and Invia, supported you fully in this endeavour and I just want to finally mention Ellen Tait who did a great deal of the organisation and bringing the artists over and we did have, as Dilom mentioned, some problems with visas, some rather last-minute worries, and I should acknowledge the help of the British Council in organising a couple of last-minute visas to get the artists over here. I’m glad the British Council’s trick worked, thank goodness you came and thank you very much for the day.

Transcribed by Jackie Howson and edited by Marion Endt.