The Art Workers’ Guild
The Art Workers’ Guild
A Guild meeting
Guild meetings are held in person at the Guild and streamed via YouTube
Thursday 16 January
Master’s Night
Simon Smith
Things I’ve learnt along the way. Forty years of working with stone.
Wednesday 29 January
Committee Meeting
Thursday 30 January
Lizzie Harper
Natural history illustration of a hay meadow landscape
Lizzie Harper is a freelance botanical and natural history illustrator. She’ll discuss the process of creating a site specific landscape, finding references and piecing together the species in a way that works visually. She’ll also discuss her materials and the techniques she uses to illustrate plants, insects, mammals, and birds in watercolour.
Thursday 13 February
Ana Maria Pacheco
Remember
Sculptor, painter and printmaker Ana Maria Pacheco talks to Colin Wiggins, art historian, printmaker and curator at the National Gallery, about Remember her largest work to date. They will also explore her extraordinary career and life.
Thursday 27 February
Tony Webb
The life of a Master Carver at St Paul’s Cathedral
Tony Webb is the last fee paying indentured apprentice in architectural wood and stone carving. He served his apprenticeship with the firm of E.J Bradford’s in South East London. Whilst there he specialised in carving in the style of the great Grinling Gibbons. After 20 years with Bradford’s he joined his old foreman at St Paul’s Cathedral where after a few years he took over to be the Master Carver until his retirement.
Thursday 13 March
Bennett Bacon
Rethinking the past: A new perspective on the Upper Palaeolithic
Upper Palaeolithic animal images from caves like Lascaux are universally celebrated as some of the most profound images created by humans. They are admired but mysterious. Recent advances are beginning to expand our knowledge of these images. Ben Bacon’s talk is about how linguistic tools are changing our understanding of this great art.
Thursday 27 March
Sokari Douglas Camp CBE
Legacies and power
British-Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp CBE focuses on socio-political issues and the history of the African diaspora in her work. Douglas Camp works in steel. The monumental sculptural group Europe supported by Africa and America was shown at the V&A and addressed the legacies of slavery, issues of power and gender, and the climate crisis.
Wednesday 9 April
Committee Meeting
Thursday 10 April
Maiko Tsutsumi
One equal music
Growing up, Maiko Tsutsumi’s world was full of tactility, feelings and story telling. She was equally at home being in the wild and in the library. The encounter with an ethnographical collection in young age instilled in her the ineffable beauty and dynamism of the objects. It was the power of presence. Tsutsumi sought this quality throughout her careers in craft, design, and academia. Guided by her default question ‘how do things work?’, her practice is a life-long journey to understanding how such quality might come to be.
Thursday 1 May
Sketchbook Evening
What are you working on?
A chance for Brothers to share sketches, models and samples of their current projects.
Thursday 15 May
Will Wootton
The art of work: skill and labour in the Roman world
In this talk, Will will explore craft traditions and skilled labour, focusing on stone working and mosaic making, as Rome’s power expanded from Republican Italy to an empire which encircled the Mediterranean and stretched from Britain to Syria. It will examine the nature and application of skill through tools, techniques and processes, the organisation of the two crafts and the passing on of knowledge, and the wider socio-economic context of makers.
Thursday 29 May
Hugh Wedderburn
Shaping up
‘I chop wood at the actual reality interface behind the inner city indoor hedge, the in-version of Suburbia on Tabard Street, once Kent Lane, once Watling Street, the ancient [land] approach to London from Europe. It is a privilege to carve narrative pieces, and I will attempt to explain a few.’
Thursday 12 June
Seher Mirza
Craft practice as dialogue for design research
Seher Mirza will talk through her creative practice research work with marginalised communities that uses textile craft as method to navigate cultural, social, economic and material contexts. She works with the duality of being both practitioner and researcher informing each with the different ways of knowing and understanding.
Thursday 26 June
Taslim Martin
Portraiture and public art
Taslim Martin is a sculptor, technician and educator, and although his creative output encompasses public art and elements of design, he has always maintained an interest in figurative sculpture and portraiture. A key element of his practise is experimenting and playing, making speculative work purely for the fun of it and trying to tease out new possibilities.
Thursday 10 July
Mark Swenarton
Neave Brown: Building a piece of city
Neave Brown is widely regarded as the greatest British housing architect of the twentieth century. This reputation derives from three schemes he designed in Camden in the 1960s: Winscombe Street, Fleet Road (Dunboyne Road) and Alexandra Road where, instead of the tabula rasa philosophy of modernism, he developed a new approach based on the streets and squares of eighteen-century London. This talk will look at the main elements of this radical approach and consider its relevance today.
SUMMER BREAK
Wednesday 24 September
Committee Meeting
Thursday 25 September
Peta Motture
Italian Renaissance sculptors at work
According to contemporary writers, Renaissance artists required both ‘ingenuity’ and ‘skill’ - but they also needed an efficient workshop and fruitful collaborations. Embracing both carving and casting, this talk will explore sculptors’ practices, including the role and impact of the trade guilds to which they belonged.
Thursday 9 October
John Stewart
British architectural sculpture
John Stewart is an architect and architectural historian and will be discussing the craft and art of architectural sculpture in late 19th and early 20th century with particular reference to the impact of the formation of the Art Workers’ Guild upon its development.
Thursday 23 October
Matt Nation
Culture shift
From the time of the Pharaohs to contemporary sculpture, including a dip into Ancient Rome, a round trip via the Renaissance, bathing in the beauty of Mughal India, and drinking in Victorian London.
A glance at a few of the more astonishing and challenging projects that have kept Matt Nation awake at night during his career in sculptural and architectural conservation.
Thursday 6 November
Noel Stewart
Hats On!
Since establishing his label, Noel Stewart has collaborated with leading fashion houses such as Balenciaga Couture, Diesel, Roksanda, Erdem, Hussein Chalayan, Givenchy, Valentino, Kenzo and Viktor & Rolf. Off the catwalk, he has acquired a loyal fan-base and his hats have been worn by too many stars to mention!
Wednesday 19 November
Committee Meeting
Thursday 20 November
Isabel Graham-Yooll
Spirit sensory
Spirit sensory is the first ever multi sensory approach to whisky (and other spirits) tasting! This event will stimulate all your senses: touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste... and all the other senses too. This, the last talk of the year, will be an experiment in taste, and you, the participants, are the subjects of this experiment.
Thursday 11 December
Annual General Meeting (members only)
Guild Meetings: Thursdays at 7pm
Committee Meetings: Wednesdays at 6.30pm
See the proposed OGM dates for 2026 here.
