reSearching: playing in the archive

Led by the Graduate School at CCW (Chelsea College of Art and Design, Camberwell College of Arts and Wimbledon College of Art), re:SEARCHING enabled artists and researchers across a number of disciplines and institutions to select artefacts in The Baring Archive and to create a new piece of work. New work will be exhibited alongside the historical pieces, a rare opportunity given the issues over conservation and stewardship that usually inhibit such an arrangement.

Although it is current practice for artists to produce work in response to collections and archives, re:SEARCHING is unusual in that the artists are reacting to a financial archive which is more often used by historians.

Practitioners have responded to a range of items, including a sketch by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Sir Francis Baring, the firm’s founder; the prospectus for the financing of the Louisiana Purchase; Russian bearer bonds (which ceased to pay interest following the Revolution); and material relating to the Buenos Aires Water Supply & Drainage Company.

Jane Collins contributes a performance to Part 2 of the exhibition. Collins was also one of a group of artists who participated in re:SEARCHING playing in the archive Part 1 an exhibition at the ING Bank in the city of London in May 2010 in response to the Baring archive.

The Baring Archive:
As part of Hogan’s work in the Research Department at Wimbledon College of Art, now part of CCW at the University of the Arts London,she has initiated a series of projects which investigate the relationship between artists, archives and scholarship, the impact this relationship can have on artists’ practice and the way that audiences perceive and relate to archives. The projects include a six-year collaboration with the ING Bank and the Baring Archive; establishing the Jocelyn Herbert Archive at Wimbledon (a major theatre design collection), and contributing to the establishment of a Centre for Art and Travel at the National Maritime Museum.

Since 2004 Eileen Hogan has been working on research projects with the ING Bank, which explore ways in which the Baring Archive and Collection can be interpreted and used by art and design communities. In 1818 the first minister of France described Barings as the sixth great power, after Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and the collection represents one of the finest financial archives in the world. Its documentation dates back to 1760 when the bank was started by Francis Baring and reaches 1995, when Barings became insolvent due to unauthorized trading and its business was acquired by ING. There have to date been 3 collaborative research projects between WCA – and now UAL - and the Baring Archive. The most recent, re:SEARCHING: playing in the archive, is a CCW-led initiative enabling artists and researchers across a number of disciplines and institutions to select artifacts in the Baring Archive and create a new piece of related work. The research explores the relationship between art and money, the implications of financial systems and the role of banking itself, and interrogates ways in which the special character of the Baring Archive can provide a test case for exploring the research potential of arts-business partnerships. Research questions investigate how the arts and business communities might engage productively in partnership to interpret and re-frame a little-known archive and reveal its value to a varied research community and the wider public.