Teenage curators favour Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas (From Watford Observer)

Teenage curators favour Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas

2:43pm Friday 28th October 2011 in Exhibitions By Melanie Dakin

Art appreciation is a skill that cannot come too early. Luckily, The Young Curators Group at artsdepot is already paving the way for teenage audiences to have their say on what goes on show in our galleries.

Established for the past four months, the eight-strong group of 16- to 19-year-olds is now staging its first exhibition, which features early artworks by a young Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, among others, from the Arts Council Collection. Since February this year, the group has attended regular workshops with artsdepot’s associate curator, Alice Lobb, in which they have learnt about the role of a curator and developed an exhibition from their own ideas.

The show, Becoming – A Select Exhibition from the Arts Council Collection sets out to examine the particular pleasures and challenges of being young and growing up, so it is particularly apt that young people have taken charge of it.

Finchley curator Samantha Lindeque, 17, says the group started out by leafing through massive catalogues of 7,500 pieces of work from the Arts Council archives. From this they selected a wish-list of 100 works, which was then narrowed down to a manageable 25 works including photography, film, sculpture and installation.

“It was a collective decision," says Samantha, who is in her second year of A levels at Woodhouse College studying art, chemistry and psychology. She intends to study psychology at university with a view to working in art therapy. Members of the Young Curators Group have been encouraged to act as ambassadors for artsdepot’s Apthorp Gallery, and many of them have completed their Arts Award as part of the programme.

Samantha, who has been volunteering at the artsdepot gallery since last year adds: “We organised the exhibition right from deciding which work to include through to designing the layout within the gallery space. Initially, we didn’t start out with any particular artists we wanted to feature but which kind of art we wanted to exhibit."

Once they had their shortlist, the Young Curators Group was also invited to the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, which manages the collection, to discuss their ideas with collection curators, and also had an opportunity to visit the vast collection stores to see some of the artworks and help narrow down the selection for their final exhibition proposal.

The final selection includes Jordan Baseman’s work on the relationship between being a child and adulthood, while Lucy Gunning explores memories of her childhood home and Tracey Emin’s film recalls her teenage bid to leave the seaside town where she grew up. Tish Murtha’s photographs of unemployed youth taken in the early 1980s and David Chadwick’s exploration of the impact of social problems on the urban environment are a timely reminder of the challenges young people face, as well as the continuing relevance of such artwork in a contemporary context.

So does Samantha have a favourite?

“I particularly like Seamus Nicolson’s Megatripolis because of the tension it portrays through such an intense crowd scene and how it transcends social boundaries. Until I joined the group, I really had no idea what a curator did, it’s been really enjoyable."

The exhibition runs until Sunday, November 27, 12noon-4pm, plus various times in the evening, at The artsdepot, 5 Nether Street, North Finchley.

www.artsdepot.co.uk