British Art Studies
This year saw sustained work on a redesign of the British Art Studies (BAS) journal platform. In July 2022, three BAS editors travelled to Amsterdam to kick off a collaboration with the Dutch digital design firm Fabrique. Over the next twelve months, designs were refined towards a relaunch in late 2023. During this financial year, the editors also added thematic tags to the backlist of BAS, assigning each past article tags that span categories such as century, place, topic, material, medium and style. This will enable browsing by theme, surface older content and enhance discoverability in the search function. Two issues of BAS were also published, beginning with Issue 23 (August 2022), which contains six long-form articles and one commissioned film that explores the work of the artist Jacqueline Bishop. The film focuses on a series of fifteen plates designed by Jacqueline called The Market Woman’s Story (2022), which use collage to celebrate the figure of the Jamaican market woman and critically engage with depictions of her, in a medium inspired by British ceramic manufacturers such as Wedgwood and Spode. Alongside a range of articles, Issue 24 (March 2023) also includes an archival feature by Alexandra Kokoli about the visual cultures of protest at Greenham Common Peace Camp, and a multi-author feature (convened by BAS contributing editor Edwin Coomasaru) titled ‘Monuments Must Fall’, which brings together ten responses from scholars and artists around the world on the politics of public monuments. During this time, the journal’s virtual residency programme, titled ‘Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism’, continued into its second year (running from October 2022 to October 2023), with dedicated research clinics held in July 2022 and an all-group workshop in October 2022. In March 2023, the journal also circulated an open call for a special issue titled ‘Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s’, which will be guest-edited by a team of four scholars: Fiona Anderson (Newcastle University), Flora Dunster (Central Saint Martins), Theo Gordon (University of York) and Laura Guy (Glasgow School of Art). The call closed in May and received more than thirty proposals.
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Installation view, Jala Wahid: Conflagration, 22 October 2022–30 April 2023, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Image courtesy of Jala Wahid. Photo: Rob Harris © 2022 BALTIC (all rights reserved)
