This Collaborative (and interdisciplinary) Doctoral Award application focuses on the art and architecture subject matter of the largely undocumented but rare and culturally/historically important print collection amassed by Richard Robinson, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh (1765-1794) and 1st Baron Rokeby. Known as the ‘Rokeby Collection’, it comprises 4,430 prints spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, held at Armagh Robinson Library, Northern Ireland’s oldest public library, which was founded by Archbishop Robinson in 1771 to make his collection of books and fine art publicly accessible.
The project is designed to use historical art, architecture, design, and production as a means of informing the development of creative practice. It will use the techniques, technologies and art and architecture subject matters as a starting point for interrogating the collection, its context, and the evolution of practice and subject matter. Using the prints as stimuli to develop a body of work that combined historical research alongside the development of creative practice will create a new body of work – in essence an extension of the Rokeby Collection – a means of drawing out notions of authenticity, curatorship, rendering/visualisation and text and image-based digital enquiry of art and architecture.
The project will involve investigative and comparative research, utilising the material and visual evidence that the prints provide. Together the student’s thesis and accompanying practical outputs are designed to draw out concepts of historic printmaking, mass production, art and architecture visualisation (pre-photography), collecting, curation, and connoisseurship. Importantly, it will also inform aspects of historical art/printmaking practice including the development and evolution of skills, styles, and visual taste as well as the technologies associated with printmaking, finishing, ink, paper, and the manufacturing process. It will help raise the profile of one of the country’s most significant, but currently under-utilised, artistic treasures and in the process, the student and supervisory team will have the opportunity to develop knowledge, understanding and skills around curatorship, visual research, cataloguing and interpretation, and the relevance of historical visual material to contemporary practice. In the process, they will have the opportunity to develop curatorial skills, gain experience of cataloguing and interpretation, alongside insights into the collection's care.
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