Projects
Rhubarb Chard, watercolour on paper, 2006
Drawing Plants
11 November 2023
Royal Academy of Arts, Saturday Sketch Club
Fay will be running a drawing workshop at the RA as part of the Academy’s Saturday Sketch Club. Further details are to be posted.
Drawing Plants at the Freud Museum
Friday 21 July 2023, 9am to 2pm
Fay will be running a drawing workshop on plants, working from direct observation. Students will be able to work in the Museum’s Garden as well as inside the Freud Museum. Please visit the Museum website to learn more and book a place.
Dust Architects
Fay and three other artists, Nick Kaplony, Martha Orbach and Judy Goldhill have set up an artists’ online platform called Dust Architects.
Martha Orbach. Animation still from 'This skin we’re in', 2014.
The platform explores questions about the personal and autobiographical in their practice. During lockdown, the group recorded many conversations which are contained on the website www.dust-architects.com
Nick Kaplony. Transmitter Receiver (Mum) 2008 c-type print mounted on aluminium 55cm x 47cm.
COVID 19 Legacy Display Steering Committee for Imperial Health Charity
Fay has joined the COVID 19 Legacy Display Steering Committee for Imperial Health Charity to create lasting memorial displays at St Mary’s, Hammersmith, and Charing Cross Hospitals.
Drawing at the Freud Museum
14 May 2023, 9.30am to 1.30pm
Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 34x33cm, pencil on paper
Fay will be running a drawing workshop to coincide with the special exhibition Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire at the Freud Museum inspired by Freud’s vast collection of antiquities. Please visit the Museum website to learn more and book a place.
Lines of Empathy Book Launch and Artists’ Conversation
Saturday 25 February 2023, 3 to 5 pm
Location: Patrick Heide Contemporary Art Gallery
www.patrickheide.com
Drawing Conversations 4: Engaging with sites of history and narrative
On-line Conference, 2 September 2022
Keynote speakers Professor Anita Taylor, Professor Deanna Petherbridge and Layla Curtis. Fay Ballard will be presenting a paper.
Main co-convenor University of Huddersfield. Free admission.
WPF Therapy www.wpf.org.uk
Exploring Parental Loss through making art
On-line talk by Fay Ballard, 8 October 2022 10.00 to 11.30 am.
Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation Exhibition
Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London
Related events programme supported by Birkbeck and Wellcome Trust
Creative Healing: Artistic Practice as a Reparative Act
Birkbeck Symposium 24 May 2022
Speakers: Professor Stephen Frosch, Dr Patricia Townsend, Dr Stella Bolaki, Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill.
Artist Book workshop with Stella Bolaki
13 June 2022
Julia Samuel in Conversation with Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill
20 June 2022
Draw your Evocative Object workshop with Fay Ballard
30 June 2022
Marina Warner in conversation with Fay Ballard
20 July 2022
Dust Architects: artists Nick Kaplony and Martha Orbach present
27 July 2022
Drawing Plants at the Freud Museum
22 July 2022
In-house workshop led by Fay Ballard
Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation
19 May 2021, 7.30-9.15pm
Birkbeck, University of London
Birkbeck Arts Week online public events
Contemporary artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill showed selected artworks informed by the process of bereavement and mourning and spoke about the reparative act of creativity on the individual. Part of Birkbeck Arts Week.
Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists
Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill will be speaking and presenting work at an online symposium, ‘Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists’, on 7 May 2021 at the University of Leicester
Organisers: Dr Imogen Wiltshire and Dr Fransiska Louwagie
Keynote speaker: Dr Glen Sujo, author and curator of Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, Imperial War Museum.
Fay and Judy are presenting their work as part of Panel 2: Art-Making, Process and Identity in their session: Inner Recreation: Psychoanalysis and Second-Generation Visual Arts
Their paper will examine the link between the need for reparation and the origin of the creative impulse, looking at psychoanalytic ideas on creativity. It will take as its case study two second-generation artist-daughters who collaborate, Judy Goldhill, brought up by parents and relatives affected by the Holocaust; Fay Ballard, whose father was placed in a Japanese internment camp during World War Two.
In Dream, Phantasy and Art, Hanna Segal builds on Melanie Klein’s ideas on the infantile depressive position and the need for reparation, by stating that art is a search for symbolic expression. The creation of this inner world is unconsciously a recreation of a lost world: what has been lost can be regained. Segal believes that art which moves us contains both death and life. Donald Winnicott writes on play and creativity. The paper will explore these ideas in the work of these two artists.
Judy’s parents escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in England. Her family lost members in the Holocaust. Judy’s father died of polio when she was a baby. Fay’s father was born in Shanghai in 1930 and interned in Lunghua camp from 1943 to 1945 before coming to England. These experiences were internalised and recreated in his novels. Fay’s mother died when she was seven.
A collaboration between Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill has led to exhibitions, ‘Breathe’ at Freud Museum (2018) and ‘Travelling Companions’ at Cambridge University (2020). Drawing on family experiences and archives, they explore memory and identity, death, loss, and mourning. They also examine the emotional charge of ‘home’ and personal belongings, as well as the companionship of the skies.
The event is supported by Association for Art History (AAH), Cultural Literacy Everywhere (CLE), the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the School of Arts at the University of Leicester.
The symposium is open to all and free to attend. Please book your place on Eventbrite.
What or Who is Your Travelling Companion?
A seminar will be held in conjunction with the exhibition
3 - 5pm Saturday 7 March 2020
Art at Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge
Free, book tickets on Eventbrite via Art at ARB: http://arbart.crassh.cam.ac.uk
Science meets humanities in this seminar exploring the notion of 'travelling companions'. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Travelling Companions in the ARB gallery space, this seminar invites you to join an interdisciplinary panel to discuss how familiar objects can act as emotional and intellectual travelling companions, both in actual time and as remembered (internalised) objects, their function and the stories they tell changing over the course of a life time. From a personal belonging charged with significance to a star guiding you across the globe, join us to investigate this theme. Speakers comprise:
Dr Ro Spankie: Curator of Travelling Companions. Is a designer, teacher and researcher and a Principal Lecturer at the University of Westminster. Ro is author of ‘An Anecdotal Guide to Sigmund Freud’s Desk’ (Freud Museum London).
Judy Goldhill: Artist Travelling Companions: Is a photographer, maker of films and artist’s books and artist in residence at the Physics and Astronomy Department, University College London. Recent exhibition ‘Breathe’ Freud Museum London 2018, and R’akia screened at the Venice Biennale as part of the Alive in The Universe project, 2019.
Fay Ballard: Artist Travelling Companions: Makes drawings, recent exhibitions ‘Breathe’ Freud Museum London and ‘Transylvanian florilegium’, National Gallery, Romania, 2018. Visiting Artist Hammersmith Hospital 2017 & 2018, she sits on Arts & Health Committee, Imperial NHS.
Sarah Pickman: BA Anthropology, University of Chicago and MA Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Bard Graduate Center, USA. Sarah is currently researching material culture of exploration and travel based at Yale University.
Revd Dr Ayla Lepine: Assistant Curate, Hampstead Parish Church London, former lecturer art history and architectural history (Courtauld Institute of Art and Nottingham University). Ayla trained for priesthood at Westcott House Cambridge, ordained 2019.
Dr Ana Araujo: Architect, teacher and researcher at the Architectural Association, she completed her PhD at UCL in 2009 and is interested in the relationship between architecture and psychoanalysis. Ana is currently working on a book on the American designer Florence Knoll.
Stephen M. Pompea: Observatory Scientist, NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, Tucson Arizona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Leiden and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Arizona.
Benjamin Weil: PhD candidate researching blood donor activism surrounding the exclusion of men who have sex with men (MSM) from blood donation at University College London. Interests include; Science and Technology Studies; Queer Studies; Queer Science and Technology Studies; HIV/AIDS; Risk; Sex and Porn Studies; Citizenship Studies; Affect/Emotions; Social Movements.
Transylvania Florilegium: Wildflowers of Romania: 12 April to 5 May 2019
The National Museum of Art, Romania, Bucharest and The Romanian Cultural Institute, London 2018.
Curator: Irina Neacșu. The Transylvania Florilegium is a collection of watercolour drawings of rare grasses and wildflowers growing in the meadows and pastures of Transylvania, one of Europe’s last medieval landscapes. It was created under the umbrella of The Prince of Wales’s Foundation Romania to record the flora living there.
The project culminated in two exhibitions and two publications presented by The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation.
The Transylvania Florilegium
The Royal College of Physicians Florilegium
Pharmacopoeia Londinensis 1618: A Florilegium of Plants. Publication 11 May and exhibition 20 to 30 August 2018 at the Royal College of Physicians.
Imperial College Health Charity Audience Engagement Programme
Fay was visiting the Auchi Dialysis Unit at Hammersmith Hospital every Wednesday in 2017 and 2018 offering practical art workshops to patients at their bedsides, part of the Imperial College Health Charity Audience Engagement Programme.
Talks given including conferences and symposia
Brief Lives: Untimely Deaths, Art & Aftermath Seminar
Presented by The Wildgoose Memorial Library in association with the Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London 2019
Artist Talks Series
Brighton School of Art 2019
In Conversation
Artist talk Freud Museum 2018
Kicking the Dog Will Do: Painting Suburbia and its Creative Charge
Conference presented by Painting/Research at Wimbledon College of Art 2018
International Day of Light
Symposium Chelsea School of Art 2018
Artist’s House Palimpsest
Across Royal College of Art 2015
Artist talk
Camberwell Print Making MA Artist Talks Series 2015-2020
Art and Mourning
Seminar on the role of creativity in healing trauma and loss
Freud Museum 2016
Artist Talks
& Model Gallery: in conversation with Derek Horton Leeds 2015
Eleven Spitalfields Gallery: in conversation with Kathy Kubicki 2014
The Drawing Room Professional Network 2014