The Tate St Ives

The Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, the only national museum in a rural context in the country. The St Ives site was built in 1993. They work with the whole of Cornwall. Most of the time they plan their exhibitions a few years in advance, and due to the big tourist industry in Cornwall, they have more visitors in summer and they prepare accordingly. The gallery is funded by the Department for Culture as the whole organisation, with three other sites in Liverpool, and the two in London, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, they also have a site for storing the exhibitions in North London. The Barbara Hepworth museum, set up in 1979 is also owned by the Tate. The only permanent exhibition in the gallery is a stained glass window by Patrick Heron.

On our trip to the Tate we saw artwork from Lily Van der Stokker, a Dutch artist who's work plays with the concepts of femininity and youth, using bright childlike colours and simple shapes. Lots of her work was installation, painted onto the walls of the gallery, such as a customised Ikea sofa against a wall painted with an explosion of colour almost bursting from the sofa itself. I really enjoyed the exhibition, I thought the pieces were all really appealing, and when I took my 9 year old brother the weekend after he did too. We also saw a large collection of work entitled Object: Gesture: Grid, St Ives and the International Avant-garde. Although lots of the work here is important in a historical context, I thought most of it was dull and uninteresting. As my younger brother described it, "What? This is art? ANYONE could do it."