In Conversation: Kip Gresham and Elenor Ling on Willard Boepple's 'Shards and Sources' exhibition
Willard Boepple at the opening of his exhibition ‘Shards and Sources’, May 2023
Kip Gresham and Elenor Ling in conversation at Fen Ditton Gallery, June 2023
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Fen Ditton Gallery podcast that was recorded at the gallery as part of our current exhibition Willard Boepple 'Shards and Sources'.
We are very grateful to Elenor Ling and Kip Gresham, both of whom have been incredibly generous with their time and knowledge not just for this exhibition but for other projects at the gallery too – namely the Contemporary Printmaking Prize earlier in the year for which they were both judges.
We first had the pleasure of working with Kip Gresham and The Print Studio, Cambridge in January 2022 on an exhibition titled ‘The Language of Abstraction, which highlighted some of Kip’s most significant printmaking collaborations during his extensive career – including John McClean, Gillian Ayres, Kim Lim, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to name a few. It was this exhibition that introduced the gallery to American sculptor Willard Boepple and his astonishing screenprints stood out as a unique and dynamic response to the medium, offering a sculptural experience through the layered medium of screenprint.
In a newly commissioned essay by American art critic, Michael Fried, he writes of the prints that they are “...manifestly the work of a sculptor as one tracks not just the interaction of the hues but also the sense of implied physical relationships among the different shapes... an implied continuity from one shape to the next, as if across a sharp spatial "fold."
It was this implied continuity and sharp spatial folds that inspired Willard to take his monoprints, translate them to vinyl and re-work the narrative back into the low relief, three-dimensional forms that you can see in the gallery today.
Kip was joined by Elenor Ling who is the Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. She is responsible for the care, interpretation and display of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s print collection, comprising 125,000 objects, and has a particular interest in histories and methodologies of collecting. Elenor was co-curator of the major, interdisciplinary exhibition The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Traces (2021), and has been the sole curator of several exhibitions in the museum’s Print Gallery.
This week the Fitzwilliam Museum received the fifth allocation of editioned prints made at The Print Studio, Cambridge, which included Willard’s print ‘George’ which is available as part of this exhibition. The museum’s long-standing relationship with the Print Studio has become one of the Fitzwilliam’s key sources for contemporary works.
So, I think we can all agree that this conversation is very timely…
We hope you enjoy this conversation and do head over to fendittongallery.com to view all the works online. The exhibition can be viewed in person at Fen Ditton Gallery, Cambridge until Sunday 18th June.
