Becca Pelly-Fry: Curator Q&A

Could you talk a bit about your background and what inspired you to become a curator?

I began my career as an artist; I did a degree in Fine Art Sculpture and was practising and exhibiting for about 7 years after graduation. Alongside my artistic practice, I always worked full time and for a while I worked in a commercial gallery, first as gallery assistant and then as curator and gallery manager. It was at this point that I realised I was getting as much from working with artists as I was from the making of art. From there, my career path went through publicly funded arts development, to festival and event management, to directorship of a new contemporary art space built by an international art materials manufacturing company. Through all of these varied roles, my interest remained firmly rooted in connection and collaboration with artists, helping them to tell their stories and engage audiences with those stories. Today, that is still the core of what drives me to do what I do.

What are the main influences for your work right now? What do you do, or where do you go to find creative
inspiration?

I am inspired by everything around me! Ideas can come from the big global, political, social or ecological issues we read about in the news; from a book I’m reading; from a conversation with an artist or fellow curator; from seeing a piece of artwork that moves me; or a random discovery on the internet that triggers a rabbit hole of investigation.

Walking in nature or curling up in a quiet corner to read a book are usually times when creative inspiration flow most easily, but to be honest most ideas are simply the result of a cumulative process of researching, absorbing, ruminating and pondering.

You’ve been curating for about ten years, could you describe your curatorial approach and has your curatorial vision changed over the years? And could you speak about what makes an exhibition interesting to you? 

At the start of my curatorial practice, I was interested in bringing artists together in a non art space and seeing what happened; simply facilitating an experiment. Over time, I’ve shifted more into the mode of active storyteller and this allows me to draw out less obvious narratives and connections between artists and artworks. My practice is collaborative by nature; it’s important to me that I have a relationship with all the artists I work with and that we have a shared understanding, or set of values, that will mean working together is an enjoyable and interesting experience for everyone.

An exhibition that holds my attention is one with a natural flow and rhythm, that tells a story and allows all the artists (and artworks) their own voice as a part of the whole. It should be open and transparent, rather than opaque and overly academic; it should be welcoming and clear, to allow for the audience to feel new experiences.

Could you talk a bit on your thoughts to current approaches to curating? Is your curatorial practice based on a lot of research, and what made you start the series of Perfectionism exhibitions?

For me, being a curator is simply about bringing people and ideas into a single space, with a clear intention and open-mindedness. The rest is done by the artists and the visitors. There is no need for a curator to take more of an authoritarian role; the magic happens when the curatorial touch is light, but authentic. There is a shift going on in the cultural sector that I believe is long overdue, from that of top-down, elitist display to interconnected, opened up co-creation. The pluralist view is so much more interesting than a single view of the world, and I am learning every day how to do this better.

In terms of Perfectionism, the original idea came from a series of studio visits undertaken back when I started as Director of (the now closed) Griffin Gallery in west London. I started to notice a common thread across a number of disparate artists’ practices, whereby there was a real dedication to the process of making. In previous years, we’d all got used to seeing artwork that was either about inspiring shock and awe, or was heavily concept-driven (lead mainly by Charles Saatchi and his band on Young British Artists). There was less focus on the process and the materials at that time, but for me those things had always held such a fascination so I was delighted to see it seemingly making a comeback. I wanted to bring that out into the light, and celebrate it; I even wrote a manifesto for Perfectionism, extolling the virtues of commitment and dedication.

How has your experience been curating for an online exhibition as opposed to a physical exhibition?

It’s been very interesting putting an online exhibition together because it brings up such different challenges and questions. Usually, the critical moment for an exhibition is when I am standing in a gallery space, surrounded by half-unwrapped artworks. That’s when the artworks start to speak to each other, and I listen. The flow of the show happens fairly naturally from there; almost as if the artworks decide for themselves where they should be placed. There are always aesthetic, intellectual and emotional surprises in that moment. Of course, when curating an exhibition entirely in the virtual space, you lose that moment, but I’ve found you discover a lot more. One discovery is the importance of contextualisation; without the physical space or physical object, one has to put a lot more description and explanation alongside the work. Some might say that takes away from the experience of looking at an artwork, but I think it adds so much that you simply wouldn’t get if you were in a real-life gallery.

What has been your most exciting or interesting lockdown discovery?

There have been a few, but I think the most critical is that I don’t need anywhere near as much stuff, or activity, or foreign travel, or endless entertainment as I seemed to fill my life with before! It’s a revelation. Simplicity is the thing, from here on out. That and more green space.