Artist Talk: Angela Palmer

There was not an empty seat in the art studio for Wednesday’s lunchtime talk by artist Angela Palmer. Years 10 to 13 had the brilliant opportunity to hear Angela discussing her extensive career in the Arts. Originally a prolific journalist, Angela has worked at the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, and as Editor of Elle Magazine. Her interest in art was revived whilst living in Hong Kong where she begun to explore drawing and painting. She went on to study at the prestigious Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, and then completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. Angela is interested in ‘mapping’ and ‘layers’ and has explored the idea of the ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘what lies beneath the surface’ through different media. Through her work Angela draws parallels between art, science and engineering, focusing on peeling back the layers of anatomy or machinery to see the intricacies that lie beneath the surface. She does this through collaborating with scientists and drawing or engraving details from CT or MRI scans onto multiple sheets of glass to map out three-dimensional floating objects. The girls were shown a moving short documentary entitled ‘Ghost Forest’, based on a major art installation of ten enormous primary rainforest tree stumps which were brought to Europe from a commercially logged forest in Ghana and displayed in Trafalgar Square in London. This work is intended to highlight the alarming depletion of the world's natural resources, and in particular the continued rate of deforestation. Through Angela’s work she explores many topical themes that relate to contemporary cultural and social issues. Angela ended the inspirational talk by encouraging her audience to be inquisitive and curious about the world around them, and that art is a subject to be explored in many ways especially through collaboration and cross curricular links to other subjects and industries.