The Borough Road Collection Archive

Borough Road Collection Archive

The Borough Road Collection Archive (2017- present) is a research platform I founded to explore A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University. The collection holds work by Bomberg and the artists he taught at the Borough Polytechnic, including Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann, Dennis Creffield, Cliff Holden and Miles Richmond. The archive treats the collection as a starting point for new work, not a finished record. It brings together commissioned artworks, new writing, oral history recordings, archival material, performances and exhibitions.

The archive grew from a question at the centre of my practice: how do people meet a collection when they can't always stand in front of the paintings? Bomberg taught his students to paint the "spirit in the mass", the felt weight of a subject, not just its outline. That emphasis on embodied looking sits awkwardly with the flattened, reproduced image we meet on a screen. Rather than hide that gap, the archive invites artists, writers and audiences to work inside it. They respond to the paintings, the stories around them, and the digital forms the collection now takes.

Recent projects include:

GIFs of Paintings turns works from the collection into short looping animations. The GIF is one of the most familiar formats of online image culture. Here it asks what happens to a painting's stillness, surface and gesture when it's set in motion and made shareable.

The Next Borough Group Painting is a commission by Ella Chedburn. She built a dataset of around 600 Borough Group paintings, drawn from the Borough Road Collection archives, Tate, Art UK and Google Images, and trained a machine learning model on it to generate new "Borough Group" paintings. The results raise questions about style, influence and the painting-school lineage the Borough Group inherited from Bomberg. They also ask whether a way of seeing can be learned from images alone.