Chris Dorsett

Chris Dorsett trained in the painting school at the Royal College of Art (1971-1974), but is best known for object-based interventionist exhibitions in museums. His work as an artist-curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (1985-1994) led to many similar projects with historical, scientific and anthropological collections in Britain, Sweden and Finland. The temporary installation techniques he developed at this time explored institutional collection-holding in a period dominated by the politics of decolonisation and environmental crisis.

Examples of Dorsett’s approach also include a post-handover intervention at the walled village of Kat Hing Wai for the Arts Development Council of Hong Kong (1998) and a residency in an Amazonian field station undertaken whilst preparing for the Trees Walking exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2004).

As a professor of fine art at Northumbria University he published internationally on the interface between experimental art practices and the museum/heritage sector. Recently, Dorsett returned to the Pitt Rivers Museum as an honorary research affiliate where his personal archive is currently being catalogued and accessioned. A new work combining writing, drawing and audio-visual recordings will be published this summer by the online journal entanglements: experiments in multi-modal ethnography.

My folded drawings can be included in art exhibitions. There’s always a small hole punched in one corner from which it is possible to hang them on a wall. Very few are rectangular and so each one dangles in an unpredictable way. The effect is awkward, as if the drawing doesn't really want to be exhibited. It doesn’t - the primary experience is in the action of unfolding and refolding. I got this idea from the mysterious Tantric diagrams one sometimes comes across in UK museums. These were folded because, having been created as magic charms, they were kept privately about the person rather than openly displayed. Another influence was Laura Marks’ essay A Noisy Brush with the Infinite (2015), which also explores the aesthetics of ‘enfolding-unfolding’.

I make short videos too. One can be viewed on this website. It documents what happened as I worked on the drawings I’ve submitted to the Northern Lights exhibition. You hear lots of ambient noise and encounter my connection-building during lockdown. For example, an article in the Times Literary Supplement made me re-read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Some of what passed through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind that June day nearly a century ago was triggered by the 1918 influenza pandemic. As I folded up my drawings for this project, Woolf’s stream of consciousness haunted every move I made.