Feature: Exhibition - Tracey Emin, Paula Rego and Matt Collishaw at the Foundling Museum

Published: 11 February 2010
by DAN CARRIER

ON first encountering them, you may look around to see if you can spot a toddler in a pushchair with cold feet, chilly hands or watery eyes.

But on closer inspection, the lost mitten on the railing, sock and teddy bear lying forlorn on the pavement are not at all what they seem: they are new works donated to the Foundling Museum by Tracey Emin.

Emin, who has made her name for her egotistical “autobiographical” art, has long been the enfant terrible of the Young British Artist scene. But these works have nothing to do with her unmade bed or tents with names of her sexual partners stitched inside. 

Instead, Emin struck upon the idea of casting children’s items in bronze during an outside art “happening” hosted in Folkestone two summers ago – where her discarded mittens, teddy bears and booties prompted a degree of twisted melancholy caused by the anguish that the owners of the apparently lost items would feel. 

The exhibition includes works from Camden Town-based artist Paula Rego and Emin’s former boyfriend Matt Collishaw. Emin’s pieces include sketches she made while pregnant in 1991 (she had an abortion), and baby clothes made for her for when she became a mother. Outside, on the museum’s steps, placed on railings and beneath a bench in Brunswick Square, are her lonely looking children’s items. 

Emin’s works are undoubtedly thought-provoking, and they can be used a starting point for a lunchbreak-length public art tour that requires only a short walk through King’s Cross. 

Along Euston Road, works by such names as Eduardo Paolozzi, Antony Gormley and Thomas Heatherwick are on display. Gormley and Paolozzi take centre stage in front of the British Library, where Camden resident Gormley has carved figures onto boulders, using his family as models. 

Gormley’s stones are gazed down upon by Paolozzi’s bronze statue, Newton After William Blake, whose presence aims to inspire those heading into the library. An earlier Paolozzi work, Piscator, can be found 100 yards along the road, in front of Euston Station. 

Nearby you will also find St Joan, erected to celebrate the opening of the Shaw Theatre in 1970. While at first it may not be obvious what the work by Keith Grant represents, a plaque beside it explains how it is meant to represent various Joan of Arc-related items – a long bow, her helmet, and the visions she had.

Opposite sits the Wellcome Trust, which includes the ground-breaking Wellcome Gallery which boasts a seven-storey installation by Thomas Heatherwick which the public can come in to see.

Heatherwick was inspired by his grandmother Elisabeth Tomalin, who lives in Hampstead, and his mother, who ran a bead shop in Portobello Road for 20 years and established the Bead Society of Great Britain. She would design bead curtains and Thomas recalled the way the light reflected through them. 

His work at the Wellcome Trust plays on this idea, while the shape of the sculpture came from a game his mother would play on New Year’s Eve. It is a German tradition, called Bleigiessen, in which you pour molten lead into a glass of water and supposedly can predict your fortune for the coming year in the  shape formed by the metal as it solidifies.

The 140,000 glass beads include a transparent plastic centre that reflects the spectrum of colours as the light hits it, throwing patterns on the atrium’s walls.

After marvelling at Heatherwick’s light-filled bead curtain, just a westwards hop across the Euston Road to the Warren Street junction, the new development of Regents Place by Sir Terry Farrell includes various works. One, by Sion Parkinson and completed this week, was the result of a competition amongst Slade School of Art students. It is based on various railing designs through the past two centuries found around Camden. 

• Tracey Emin, Paula Rego and Matt Collishaw are at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1, until May 9, £7.50 (£5 conc; children free), closed Mondays, 020 7841 3600,
www. foundlingmuseum.org.uk