In the Spotlight: Angelica Jopling
"Angelica Jopling is the founder of Incubator Gallery, an art space situated on Chiltern St, London, which exclusively shows the work of new, young artists. She is at the forefront of a new movement to show the work of young artists, focusing on illuminating their talent and making it possible for them to build a reputation and income. She is a brilliant eye in a world that has become a little jaded.”
- Bella Freud
When curating do you feel for intuition or for reason?
It's largely intuition but I suppose I build a scaffolding of structure and routine around the process to allow that. When curating, it's such an intimate, vulnerable, human-to-human process, so there isn't really a logic to be applied. I’m constructing a narrative, putting things together, making sense of it all and then sometimes I have to pull it all apart again to discover what the work truly wants to say, to create a journey.
Are there any rituals as part of your curation?
Every artist is different and each collaboration has its own particular rhythm. But music seems to be the one constant. I’m always playing music when curating. It shifts you into a kind of flow and takes you out of your head into somewhere more instinctive.
Work by Mona Hatoum, left.
Work by Graham Silveria-Martin, right.
Are beauty and attraction an important concept to your process?
Yes, I think beauty, not in the conventional sense of aesthetic beauty, but beauty in ideas and a way of thinking. Beauty in a way of carrying oneself in a space or in work.
Are there any specific moments, memories, or environments that have kind of shaped your processes or your ideas?
It's more an accumulation really – absorbing things through osmosis over years. I was quite fortunate to grow up surrounded by art and artists, that whole atmosphere of making and thinking has shaped everything. And then art history, which was a real gift to be able to study it properly. That all gave me the framework that underpins how I consider things and build connections between works and ideas across time.
Do you see your personal fashion as a form of storytelling in the same way as you see art?
Storytelling is such an interesting word, yes I think so. It’s a decision you make every day. I often like to conjure characters from films or in books so storytelling definitely comes with dressing in that sense. Part of me wishes I still had a school uniform; I crave rigidity but then there are all these things - texture, colour, form - too seductive to resist entirely!
Discover Angelica's work here:
https://www.incubatorart.com/
