Biographies

Artistic Statement

Key to Eggebert & Gould’s collaboration is the compatibility of their theoretical concerns and the form of their visual expression. They make site-specific installations using the media of photography, video, sound, assemblages and drawing. They explore the history and architecture of a place in order to engage the audience in a critical appreciation of what may be forgotten stories. They work with museums and their archives, botanical gardens and landscapes.

History
They began their collaboration in 1999 at the British Library. For the Spin show they installed a sound work around the glass tower of the King’s Library editing together their selection of extracts from the Oral History section of the National Sound Archive. In 2000 they made a performance installation for Paradise Revisited at Bury Museum & Gallery using found objects from the museum archive. Their work In the Botanic Garden developed during their 2001 residency at Cambridge University Botanic Garden included video works installed amongst the plant collection of the glass houses. This work was reviewed by the Independent on Saturday. They were artists in residence at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery from September 2001 to February 2002. Eggebert & Gould are currently developing curatorial projects including an international exhibition Nature and Nation : Vaster than Empires.

Anne Eggebert is a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. She studied at Central Saint Martins graduating with a First Class Degree in Fine Art in 1993 followed by an MA in Fine Art Media at the Slade. She was a member of the academic and curatorial team for Foreign Bodies a collaborative exhibition between Central Saint Martins and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 2001.
Eggebert makes site-specific works that explore the role of authoritative devices such as anthropology, museology, taxonomy, photography and surveillance in the construction and projection of national cultural identity. Central to her work is the deconstruction of the notion of Englishness and its related ideological fictions. Eggebert has shown work at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Southampton City Art Gallery; the Towner Gallery and Museum Eastbourne; Tate St Ives. She has also moved with her family into Kettle’s Yard House Museum, Cambridge. This work was recently included in Housework at Angel Row Gallery Nottingham.

Polly Gould lectures in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and is a thesis supervisor on the Fine Art BA Hons Degree at Canterbury School of Art and Design. She studied at Central Saint Martins graduating with a First Class Degree in Fine Art in 1993 followed by postgraduate study from 1994 to 1998 and was awarded and MA in Fine Art, and an MA in Theory at The Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands. While there, she wrote Manifestations: Performing the Word a collection of essays, stories and scripts in which she relates theory to vision and the body by performing the word. She is co-editor of The Dynamics of Now: Issues in Art and Education, 2000, Tate Publications. She is a contributor to the Piet Zwart Publication Public Possessions and Private Obsessions and writes reviews for AN Magazine and PAJ. She was Exhibitions Organiser for Hygiene, a visual arts exhibition due to open at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from May to July 2002.
Underlying her work is a concern with enigma of appearance and power; the ethics of our relations as speaking subjects; and the curious marriage of voice and word. Her work is an exploration into the word’s potential for making and unmaking the world, with particular focus on feminist debates on sexual difference and the disruptive possibilities of performance. She has exhibited at the Schlöss Rheydt Museum, Mönchen Gladbach, Germany; Digital ’96, Cologne, Germany; The Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida, USA; CBK, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; W139, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.