V&A X Bow Arts Fellowships: artists Adam Moore and Laura Wilson to engage the community in exploring materials & local ecologies in Newham
The V&A has partnered with Bow Arts to create two Artist Fellowships exploring histories and practices of making, manufacturing, and materials in the Newham area.
The artists will be based at Bow Arts’ Royal Albert Wharf site, situated in the Docklands in East London. The Fellowships are part of the V&A Research Institute (VARI), supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The artists will work closely with VARI, the National Art Library (NAL) and Archives teams, as well as with V&A East, to examine local ecologies and our relationship to nature within the urban environment.
Adam Moore is an Anglo Caribbean artist from east London making dance and performance. Accumulating since 2020, his technical studio practice houses his choreography and dancing in design and installation and expands into post-studio practices making public art and site related interventions. He creates ambient schemes – unique collections of works across mediums that research, explore, and invite a witnessing of how we live, partner, and invent with life’s myriad pluriformities now, and other ways that we might, giving primacy to the embodied and experiential, choreographic and relational, material and spatial – in reference to the immediate surroundings of something and the pattern of systems and structures from which it projects. His work on the fellowship with collections and archives transcends photography and digital collage, video, ways of gathering, furniture design and print in collaboration with the unique socio-experiential pluriformities of industry, infrastructure, ecologies, and the built environment choreographing the Docklands’ past, present, and future.
Laura Wilson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and lives & works in London. She is interested in how history is carried and evolved through everyday materials, trades and craftsmanship, and works with specialists to develop sculptural and performative works that amplify the relationship between materiality, memory and tacit knowledge. Laura plans to connect a group of women involved in industry in Newham, working across disciplines to understand the ecologies of fabric production and women’s workwear in the local area. She will be in residence from January to March 2024.
These site-specific Artist Fellowships explore new and innovative modes of museum engagement for the 21st century and anticipate the opening of V&A East Museum and V&A East Storehouse in east London in 2025. To encourage a collaborative atmosphere and to welcome the local community into the space, the artists invite members of the public to get in touch to visit them in the studio.
Loose Ends
Adam Moore organised and curated a public programme of events. Loose ends — Local Ecologies and Materials in Newham was a series of free workshops bringing together artists, designers, architects, and cultural producers working across ecology and the built environment to explore local ecologies and materials in Newham. Hosted by the Department of Architecture and Visual Art (AVA) at the University of East London’s Docklands campus, together with the invited panelists the workshops invite you to participate in transforming notions of what it means to be local and work locally and artistically with people, places, ecologies, and materials.
Thursday 16th November What does it mean to be local?
Thursday 23rd November What are local ecologies?
Thursday 7th December What are local materials?
Laura Wilson: Artist Spotlight
Laura Wilson: V&A East X Bow Arts Fellowship
We interviewed Laura Wilson about the V&A East X Bow Arts Fellowship, and the rich history of textiles within Newham.
