Sarah Mayhew-Craddock looks forward to an exciting new project marrying the past and the present like never before

Sometimes it’s easy to forget, as one scurries around the labyrinthine warrens of the Ashmolean Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum, that with a moment’s pause and a second’s scratch beneath the surface (metaphorically speaking – touch at your peril!) so many of the ancient artefacts on display are as relevant now as they were on the day that they were created.

The 2012 Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price has been playing a part in Oxford’s art scene for some time. Price graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in 1988 and it was during this time that she became a founding member of the Oxford-based indie pop band, Talulah Gosh (you may recognise her as one of the singers). Price has also been a familiar face on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus at Chilton near Didcot where, in 2012, she became the first artist-in-residence at the Rutherford Appleton Space Laboratory, and she has recently returned to Oxford to take up a permanent university lectureship.

So how does cutting edge ‘secret science’ marry up with contemporary art and the Ashmolean’s ancient artefacts? Well, having been awarded the prestigious £60,000 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums, (one of the highest value contemporary art awards in the country) Price has won a commission that will enable her to explore the archives and collections of the Ashmolean Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum. She will look, in particular at photographs of artefacts and documents used historically by curators, anthropologists and archaeologists, while simultaneously engaging with the social and psychological implications of digital technologies. Ultimately unravelling the mystery behind museums through her commission will comprise a single-screen video. She said: “Art should be a way to understand our time … and influence it.”

The video installation will present and narrate artefacts from the Ashmolean's collection, with a focus on the female figure and the photographic and archival means of disclosing this figure over time.

What is distinctive about this particular award is that the prize doesn’t celebrate completed work or an achievement; instead it is awarded to a national museum in order to acknowledge talent and unlock potential that enables artists to create new work for a museum collection. Reaffirming just how relevant Price’s practice is in relation to an organisation like the Ashmolean, Charlotte Higgins, arts journalist and member of the judging panel for the award, commented on Price winning the prize: “When Elizabeth Price presented her project for Oxford it immediately became clear that she was on her way to producing a thrilling artwork that will dig deep into the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers’ archives and ask some characteristically penetrating questions of the way we think about and record the past.”

Higgins elaborated on the strength in numbers offered by the University of Oxford’s world class institutions: “The panel was excited by the intellectual sparks that will be fired by Elizabeth’s presence in the museums, and the curatorial, research and teaching possibilities that will flow from the work. Price is an artist who is working at the peak of her powers, but is still underrepresented in British institutions. It’s fitting that the museums of the city where she studied and now teaches should be together committed to correcting this.”

Intrigued by what it is that Price has unearthed I asked the Ashmolean if they might allow us locals a sneaky at some of the exhibits and archives that have captured the artist’s imagination and held her attention. I was pointed in the direction of numerous examples of small, simple, hand-modelled, terracotta female figurines that can be found in abundance in the Ashmolean’s collections – it is these treasured bums, breasts, and belly-buttons that have inspired Price.

Like the majority of us (I would imagine), Price doesn’t claim to be an expert in antiquities, but her imagination has been captured by the museums’ extraordinary archaeological and ethnographic collections. Created from about 3000 to 1000BC, some of the figurines are believed to represent mother goddesses, others goddesses or yakshis (female nature spirits – visit the Ashmoelan’s Gallery 12, India to AD 600), they appear bold, and brave, powerfully direct (certainly more Sindy than Barbie). While it is difficult to confirm why they were created, who created them, or for whom, it is clear that these figurines played a significant role during the Bronze Age.

Interestingly Price wishes to explore what these objects mean to us now, or what they might mean reimagined through the technologies she uses within the context of a new, single-screen video work that will enhance and add a fresh layer to the museum’s collection. Commenting on an artist’s use of materials she said: “I use digital video to try and explore the divergent forces that are at play when you bring so many different technological histories together... I’m interested in the medium of video as something you experience sensually as well as something you might recognise.”

There certainly appears to have been a marked shift towards the contemporary in the Ashmolean’s curatorial approach of late. Caroline Douglas, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, said: “Her commission will respond directly to the long and rich history of the Ashmolean’s collection to produce a hugely significant new work – the first ever moving image work by a living artist to be acquired by the institution."

Previously Price has claimed that her videos take a year to make, so between now and the unveiling of this exciting, new commission I urge you to pip Price to the post. Explore the Ashmolean’s collection, and see for yourselves just how widespread this long-standing practice of making sculptural images of women was throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East… reimagine these confidently carved, strikingly strong and sensual female figures as objects that you might make, cherish, or commission.

The Ashmolean Museum is open Tues–Sunday 10am-5pm. Admission is free
Call 01865 278002
Contact the Contemporary Art Society at contemporaryartsociety.org