9 July 2010 - 4 September 2010

Jim Partridge & Liz Walmsley: Sitting and Looking - part of the Maker/Curator series

“Thinking is more interesting than knowing. But less interesting than looking” - Goethe

IC:Innovative Craft and Dovecot Studios are proud to have invited award-winning furniture designers/site-specific arts partnership Jim Partridge & Liz Walmsley to curate a new exhibition.  The exhibition will bring together objects from various disciplines and explore the relationship between making and curating.

This is the second in the Maker/Curator series and will bring together furniture design, contemporary photography, painting, ceramics and jewellery.  Jim Partridge explains: “We haven’t selected these people’s work to represent a particular theory or storyline.  The initial choice was more simple and more visceral than that.  These are people whose work inspires us, and we want to share it.” Exhibitors include Gordon Baldwin, El Ultimo Grito, Thomas Heatherwick, Nel Linssen, Vico Magistretti, Garry Fabian Miller, David Poston, Rupert Spira and Ann Sutton. 

Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley will be working on the exhibition design as well as the curatorial content for the show and some of their own award winning carved oak furniture will be on view. 

The pair have worked together designing and making furniture and other functional woodwork for over 20 years.  The scope of their work ranges from small domestic pieces to monumental outdoor commissions.  When the partnership began, Jim , who studied with John Makepeace at Parnham, had already established a reputation for his vessels and furniture.  Initially the partnership worked on outdoor projects such as footbridges, seats and shelters, the aim being to make work ‘which has a strong but quiet presence in the landscape.’ This remains true, though in recent commissions they have broadened that landscape to include the built environment resulting in award winning commissions such as an altar for Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford and seats for Compton Verney and Ruthin Crafts Centre.  In Scotland their work can be seen at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens as well as the gardens of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute and Ardtornish in Argyll.