Arts Council Collection Curator, Ann Jones explores Tania Kovats’ 2007 work, Books from the Museum of the White Horse Library, Non-Fiction, 2007, one of the works featured in our latest touring exhibition, On Paper, which will be shown at venues across the UK throughout 2018, until Spring 2019.
In 2006, British artist Tania Kovats collaborated with the Ruskin School of Art and the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford in order to gain an understanding of the conventions of drawing and recording archaeological finds. She then used these techniques to make a series of drawings in relation to the Uffington White Horse, a 3,000-year-old drawing carved into the chalk downland in southwest Oxfordshire.
Together with her own drawings and prints of horse-related subjects, Kovats assembled a collection of archaeological and vernacular artefacts relating to this monument and horses in general, and housed them in what she called The Museum of the White Horse, a converted horsebox that toured to various locations including hillsides and racecourses from August to December 2007. She referred to it as a ‘travelling landscape museum’ which explores ‘our relationship with the horse as a symbolic and actual point of access into the landscape and the white horse as a mythical archetype.’
Books from the Museum of the White Horse Library, Non-Fiction, 2007 is currently showing in On Paper at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, until 3 March.
The Arts Council Collection own ten works from this series.
On Paper is an Arts Council Collection touring exhibition. After Perth, it will tour to Oldham, Inverness, Wrexham, Swansea, Bath and Honiton until April 2019. The other nine works from Kovats' series in the Arts Council Collection will be shown at the Edge, University of Bath 20 April - 16 June.