STATEMENT OF WORK

Giles Round (b.1976) lives and works in London and St Leonards-on-Sea. Round works across disciplines – including art, design and architecture. Works often take the form of long-term open-ended projects in which exhibitions themselves become the medium. For example, Round’s ongoing work, The Art Direction of the Noguchi Museum (2018–) is an enquiry into the role an artist might play as an embedded part of institutional and design teams, but also of society’s infrastructures and organisations at large. In 2011 Round co-founded The Grantchester Pottery [TGP] – a collaborative design studio structured loosely on Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops Ltd with the similar intention to ‘substitute, wherever possible the directly expressive quality of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction’. Centred around ceramics and painting, TGP can be understood as an artists’ collective, a dysfunctional business and as a conceptual artwork in itself. Between 2011-2016 they exhibited in many public institutions including the Camden Arts Centre, ICA and Whitechapel Gallery (London) and David Dale Gallery (Glasgow). Recent works have increasingly conflated biographical details, imagery and writings of artistic antecedents with Round’s own. The resulting objects, populated with citation and ‘misappropriation’, are semi-autobiographical, somewhat fictitious, and all in their own way, attempts to communicate with the dead.