About

Acclaimed writer and art historian Tanya Harrod will lead an engaging discussion exploring a variety of themes and ideas around the work of artists Georgie Hopton and Mary Delany. Separated by 250 years, their collaborative exhibition currently on show is a kind of time-travelling conversation that reveals the artists' shared fascination with the botanical and their exquisite skill in crafting their work. The conversation will be joined by exhibition curator, Ingrid Swenson.

Georgie Hopton lives and works in London. She graduated from St. Martins in 1989. Moving between figuration, abstraction and pattern, working with and across varied media, collage forms the core of the artist's practice. Citing her passion for colour and texture as coming directly from her mother's cottage industry quilt-making and knitting, Hopton feels indebted to her idiosyncratic sensibility and love for the exquisitely handmade. Amongst her heroes she names the artists and makers of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Arts and Crafts movement as well as Mary Delany. Hopton looks to nature for her inspiration, materials, tools and teaching. Until recently, she spent many long summers in her upstate New York farm where the studio and the kitchen garden became her creative laboratory for the production of unique artworks as well as designs for wallpaper and textiles, made under the umbrella title Produce. Hopton's work is held in prominent public collections such as Tate, the Government Art Collection, Arts Council Collection and the Royal London Hospital as well as many private collections in the UK and internationally. She is represented by Lyndsey Ingram, London.

Tanya Harrod is the author of the prize-winning The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999). With Glenn Adamson and Edward S. Cooke she is the co-founder editor of The Journal of Modern Craft. Her book The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, modern pots, colonialism and the counterculture won the 2012 James Tait Black Prize for biography. Recent books include The Real Thing: essays on making in the modern world (2015), Craft (2018) and Humankind: Ruskin Spear, Class, Culture and Art in 20th Century Britain (2022). She has written for The Burlington Magazine, Frieze, The Guardian, Crafts, The Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement. She is on the Advisory Panel of The Burlington Magazine, was Advisor to the Craft Lives Project based at the National Sound Archive of the British Library and is a member of the Contemporary Art Society's Crafts Acquisitions Committee. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and was a Senior Research Fellow at The Paul Mellon Centre in 2021. She is currently working on a double life of Margaret and Rolf Gardiner.

Ingrid Swenson is a curator and writer. She was Director of acclaimed arts organisation PEER, in east London from 1998 to 2021. She has worked with and commissioned over 150 artists including Mike Nelson, Martin Creed, Siobhán Hapaska, Anthony McCall, Fiona Banner, Jadé Fadojutimi, Lubna Chowdhary and Vlatka Horvat. Other curatorial projects include Raymond Pettibon (2002) and The Best is Not Too Good for You (2013), both for Whitechapel Art Gallery. More recently she curated Stephen Cripps, In Real Life for Turner Contemporary, Margate (2022), and the inaugural exhibition for the relaunched The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath, Being There (2024-5). She is the co-author of Masterpieces in Pieces (Hachette, 2022) and Shopping Lists, A Consuming Fascination (Cheerio, 2023).