LONDON.- Artist in Residence Katrina Palmer is presenting her latest work in the National Gallery. In an intimate room, the usual paintings on view from the collection are no longer visible. Instead, visitors are invited to enter a specially constructed reading room by Palmer and engage with the artist’s new project, a book entitled 'The Touch Report'.
Named after the National Gallery’s record of incidents in which works of art are touched while on public display, Palmer’s experimental writing explores the fragile material conditions and perceived power of historical paintings, while explicitly addressing their violent imagery.
Palmer invites the public to read 'The Touch Report' and to reconsider the National Gallery’s collection through the words that describe them. 'The Touch Report' narrates the experience of an artist invited to respond to a museum of historical paintings. The artist begins with an audit of the collection that focusses on the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension within the images.
Visitors can read the book in a low-lit reading room, empty of paintings. An illuminated space on the wall shows the location of the last picture to hang in the room, alongside an unattributed sculpture found in the National Gallery’s art stores, and a sealed bookcase.
A National Gallery publication accompanies the project. This is the first survey of Palmer’s career to date and includes a newly commissioned essay by Oreet Ashery exploring the central themes in the artist’s practice. A new text by Palmer herself reflects on the process and outcomes of her residency, as she engages with the multiple representations of violence and physical tension on display in the collection through the lens of the Gallery’s institutional protocols.
The Artist in Residence programme is a collaboration with the Contemporary Art Society, generously supported by Anna Yang and Joseph Schull, who will acquire an artwork produced during the residency for this year’s Partner Museum, Touchstones Rochdale.
Palmer’s work explores a range of spaces from island quarries to offices, prisons to coastal landscapes. Using objects, sound, writing and drawing she investigates the possibilities of sculptural materiality through text and language. Previous projects have engaged with concepts of absence and dislocation within historic sites.
Palmer has been invited to respond to the collection of the National Gallery in partnership with Touchstones Rochdale. She began her residency in December 2023 and has worked over the course of a year in the National Gallery’s on-site artist’s studio, benefiting from the close proximity to the collection and archives.
Palmer is the fourth Artist in Residence to be chosen since the launch of the Gallery’s Modern and Contemporary Programme, following the appointment of Rosalind Nashashibi in 2019, Ali Cherri in 2021 and Céline Condorelli in 2022.
Katrina Palmer says: ‘Since being at the National Gallery, I’ve become aware of the varying and affective impacts of touch, along with its risks. Exceptional levels of skill and refinement are projected through the paintings and the maintenance of their ageing surfaces. The imagery on the other hand includes severed heads, envy and sex, the churning of bodies and an array of violences enacted under the auspices of civilisation. Here half-human beings are flayed alive and an emaciated man is dead but not always. I've become emersed in these dangers and wonders and the residency seems worth it as it is genuinely strange.’
Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, says: ‘The residency programme invariably leads to new and interesting perspectives on the Gallery and on our collections. Katrina Palmer’s project as Artist in Residence reflects on her fascination with the emotional and physical tensions recounted in the narrative subjects of National Gallery paintings and with the material vulnerability of the paintings themselves.’
Caroline Douglas, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, says: ‘Now going into its fourth year, this residency project has established itself as a unique opportunity for an artist to engage with two UK institutions of very different scale and circumstances. The programme at Touchstones Rochdale has been very impressive for many years, championing women artists in particular and leading the way in engaging with its communities. I am confident that Katrina Palmer will find it an enriching experience to spend the coming year exploring all the possibilities the residency offers.’
Mark Doyle, Director of Arts, Heritage and Wellness at Your Trust/Touchstones Rochdale, says: ‘We’re delighted to be working with the National Gallery on its Artist in Residence programme. Katrina’s approach to sculpture challenges accepted norms, and her interest in memory and absence complements Touchstones’ work to uncover the stories that aren’t currently being told by Rochdale’s collections. We’re looking forward to seeing how our collections and archives will help to inspire a new piece of work by an internationally acclaimed artist.’
Lisa Le Feuvre, Inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, says of the National Gallery publication that will accompany the project, 'In a generation, just a few artists exist who have the ability to revivify what art can be. Katrina Palmer is one such artist. She considers how we humans use objects to test our humanity, and with that reveals the very inhumanity of who we have been.'
Born 1967 in London where she also now lives and works, Katrina Palmer’s practice encompasses sculpture, writing, drawing, audio environments, performance, and video. Palmer is best known for her investigations of sculptural materiality, which often involve written compositions and site-specific recordings to explore histories of absence within landscapes or institutional spaces. Her commission End Matter for Artangel in 2015 saw her situated on the Isle of Portland where Portland stone is quarried. She produced an audio tour based on her writing during her residency on the isle which was turned into a play for Radio 4 and a publication.
Palmer has exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the Hayward Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and the Henry Moore Institute. In 2014, she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists and was shortlisted for the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award in 2015. She completed her PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2012. A third edition of her book The Dark Object (Book Works, London, 2010) was published this year. Palmer is a Professor of Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art.
