In this week’s blog our Art Collection Documentation Assistant Gaby Cortes discusses the work she has been undertaking for the first phase of a campus-wide audit of the Art Collection, highlighting our student artworks on paper from the Edinburgh College of Art.

Over the course of this year as part of a long-term plan to fully audit all of the Art Collection (over 8000 different pieces!) across campus, I have been focusing on auditing the artworks on paper that we have here in the Main Library, the majority of which are pieces of coursework from former Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) alumni.

These works on paper officially became part of Art Collection after the merger between the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art in 2011 and covers student works from throughout the 20^th and 21^st century. However due to its sheer size much of the collection hadn’t been fully assessed or catalogued since the move from ECA to the storage facilities at the Main Library. My goals for the first phase of the audit have been to go through the entire collection and see not only who’s works we actually have but also to assess their needs for future conservation and storage requirements. If you want to learn more about the wider aims of our audit, click here to read our previous blog post about it!

As a result of this work, I’ve been coming across artworks which really help shed light on the artistic development of ECA students and how our wider Art Collections have been used in teaching over the years.

One of the clearest examples of this are how often I’ve been seeing studies of the Cast Collection crop up in students’ coursework. Initially acquired in the late 18^th and early 19^th as a teaching collection to illustrate Classical art, the Cast Collection grew to contain a total of 194 casts of famous Renaissance, Gothic, Antique and architectural sculpture. As you can see in the images below, over 100 years later we can see evidence of this part of the Art Collection still actively being used as resource by students, helping them to learn how to accurately draw the human form.

Cast Study of Clement Pappi’s ‘Dying Adonis’ by David Michie (1950)

ECA Plaster Cast of Clement Pappi’s ‘Dying Adonis’ sculpture

Use of the University Art Collection as a teaching resource is still something we strongly advocate for today, particularly through our Contemporary Art Research Collection (CARC), so it’s nice to see such a clear record of a history of this approach that stretches back even to the early days of the collection.

Another interesting insight I’ve found while auditing this part of the collection is that it seems that a number of students over the years were granted travelling scholarships to go abroad and enhance their skills. Scattered throughout these artworks we can see evidence of students granted these scholarships travelling across Europe, often visiting cities that are regarded as cultural centers of the Western Art world like Paris, Amsterdam and Florence.

The work produced by students while on their Travelling Scholarship are some of my favourite parts of this collection. To me they are like visual diary entries-often capturing fleeting moments in time for these young artists, allowing us to follow their journey across Europe.

‘Street Scene from the Window, Florence’ (Left) and ‘Study of a Parisian Street’ (Right) by Marjorie Wallace (Travelling Scholarship 1947-1948)

This scholarship seems to have run for a number of years, lasting in this particular form up until at least the late 1950’s, but I haven’t been able to find out much more about it yet! It’s fascinating however to get a glimpse through the artworks themselves of these talented students being given opportunities and financial support by the university to explore areas of the world they might not otherwise have been able to and obtain experiences that could go on to inform their ongoing artistic practice.

Overall, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know this part of the collection better and I look forward to uncovering more about it. For now, I’ve only been able to assess about ¼ of all the works on paper in this store but I’m making steady progress and will post updates on anything else interesting that I find in the future!