What are the artworks up to when we aren’t there?

What are the artworks up to when we aren’t there?

Do the figures talk to each other? do they gossip? do they laugh?

Do they meet up for coffee like old friends?

Do they miss being looked at by gaggles of school children and a tired teacher?

When I came home from University, I would go and visit the Tate, and it always used to feel like I was meeting up with old friends when I walked into the gallery space. The paintings would welcome me back, Ophelia would give a little wave from her watery deathbed, and the figures in Bacon’s triptych would give me a cheeky smile with their jagged teeth.

Perhaps it was because I had studied these paintings, and so on seeing them again, it took me back to being in the history of art classroom at age 16 with my teacher who used to point at the images on the projector with a hockey stick.

Nostalgia aside, and back from a brief stint down memory lane with me, I do believe that sometimes if you look close enough, you can hear an artwork. They have so much to say. Yes, there’s chit chat in Breugel’s snowy scenes, a splash of Icarus falling from the sky, and the sound of footfall. But there is also something deeper. 

What stories do the figures have to share, what can they teach me about how they lived, how can they tell me how to live now?  

I wonder what Pacita Abad’s L.A Liberty would think about all this, what she’s been saying behind our backs, after all, she’s been alone in Spike Island for some time now, she must have a lot to tell us.

But change is whispering in the air, these artworks may not have to be lonely for much longer. As museums and galleries open up, they can have your company all day long, and on theVOV, exhibitions past and present can have your company 24 hours a day 7 days a week from wherever you may be in the world. 

We are truly entering a limitless phygital world.

14 Magnolia Double Lamps are being switched on in the South London Gallery...

There's a python writhing and hissing on the ceiling at Nottingham Contemporary…

Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts is getting called into session…

It’s time to reunite and catch up with old friends and even make new ones, from Lisa Brice to Tony Cokes and back again. 

Hear what they have been dying to tell you; Come VOV with us. 

with love, from Lottie @theVOV