Creative Connections

Creative Connections Cornwall is a project about people and place.

Creative Connections Cornwall is a project about people and place in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, and Mounts Bay Academy in Penzance. The project connects young people from Cornwall with the award-winning artist, Joy Gregory, to explore the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection.

Together with portraits by Joy Gregory of people she has met in Cornwall, the students have made new photographs of people significant to them, to be shown alongside the portraits from the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection, including two new acquisitions showing for the first time.

During an initial visit to Mounts Bay Academy in May 2021, the students selected portraits from the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. The young people’s choices were based on aesthetic considerations – did they like the portrait image – and whether they felt interested in an individual’s biography, but also addressed issues like representation and language.

The students’ final selection of portraits includes painters, writers, potters, actors, politicians, athletes, musicians and more, and forms the starting point for the exhibition, showing at The Exchange this summer. Sitters include Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Helen Glover, Gluck, Barbara Hepworth, Roger Hilton, D.H. Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, and Harold Wilson. The chosen works range from photography to painting and drawing and include portraits by artists such as Terry Frost, Yvonne Gregory, John Hedgecoe, E. O. Hoppé, Ida Kar, Sebastian Kim, Man Ray and Madame Yevonde.

The exhibition also includes work and artefacts from local collections related to the sitters.