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Two
of the Royal College of Art’s most
important collections have been made available to the general public
through a new digitisation project which is accessible through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).
The Record of
Student Work is a rare collection, containing over 30,000 slides of
student work, which dates back to the 1960s and includes early work by
notable College alumni including David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Ridley
Scott and Thomas Heatherwick. A comprehensive and unique resource, it
provides insight into the early creative processes of some of Britain’s
best-known artists and designers, usually captured as they complete
their postgraduate studies with installation shots from students’
degree shows.
The nature of the collection - comprised mainly of 35mm slides and
usually locked in filing cabinets in the RCA library - has meant that
many of these images have never been published. Now however, a
three-year scanning project has resulted in over 5,000 of the most
notable images from the collection being made publicly available for
the first time.
The earliest slides (1960-1978) represent ad hoc attempts by individual
departments to record their students’ work. Fashion and Textiles are
especially well represented with images of the work of Ossie Clark and
Zandra Rhodes among many others. However, from 1979, at the instigation
of Christopher Frayling, then Professor of General Studies, Jan Murton,
slide curator, and photographer Barry Marsden, the Royal College of Art
degree show was comprehensively photographed and catalogued across all
departments for the first time. The approach continues to this day,
although slides were replaced with digital photography in 2003.
Notable alumni whose work is represented in this selection include:
David Hockney, Zandra Rhodes, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Julien
Macdonald, Philip Treacy, Orla Kiely, Harold Offeh and Thomas
Heatherwick. These images are a representative sample of the entire
collection 1960-2002 and all have been scanned from the original 35mm
slides. Senior tutors from each department worked with the Special
Collections Manager to identify key students’ work. Once a student was
selected, every available slide of their work was digitised to provide
a comprehensive picture of their work.
In addition to the Record of Student Work, over a thousand works from
the Royal College of
Art Collection of Paintings have been digitised and are also being
made available through VADS. The Royal College of Art Collection is an
invaluable resource of works that represent significant developments in
British painting from the middle years of the 20th century to the
present. The collection is made up of works donated by Painting
graduates and staff. Examples include works by: Edward Bawden, Eric
Ravilious, Paul Nash, John Piper, Frank Auerbach, John Minton, Peter
Blake, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Dinos Chapman and
Sophie von Hellermann.
Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art said: “These are
indeed remarkable resources. Those selected from the Record of Student
Work have been chosen not only for their subsequent eminence and
reputation, but also for embodying particular trends, or producing
especially idiosyncratic or revealing work. In both collections, the
works have considerable research value and represent over half a
century of work here at the RCA”
Neil Parkinson, Special Collections Manager added: “The College
believes in making the images available as widely as possible on a
non-commercial basis for the purposes of learning, teaching and
research. The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), which collates images
from the HE sector for educational use, shares this aim, which makes
them a natural partner for delivery of our image collections to the
widest possible audience.”
The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)
is a
Research Centre within the Library and Learning Services Department at
the University for the Creative Arts, and specialises in the
management, storage, presentation, and archiving of digital images and
other arts-based assets. VADS was founded to provide services to the
academic community 14 years ago, and since that time it has built an
online collection of more than 120,000 images of rare and unique
collections from libraries, museums, and archives in universities and
colleges across the UK, which are made available online for the
purposes of learning, teaching, and research at: www.vads.ac.uk
View the collections online at:
Royal College of
Art Record of Student Work
Royal College of Art
Collection
