Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Commissioned through the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums 2011 for Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, with generous support from the Sfumato Foundation. The work was selected by Adam Chodzko, Maurice Davies, Rosy Greenlees and the late Michael Stanley.
The Contemporary Art Society’s Annual Award for Museums offers £60,000 to commission new work that, once completed, will remain in the museum’s permanent collection. Now in its fourth year, the Award is open to all 65 museum members.
The Winner of the Contemporary Art Society’s Annual Award for Museums 2011 was announced by Cornelia Parker on 14 November 2011. Currently in production, Christina Mackie’s third chapter of The Judges will explore some of the questions raised in the earlier versions, whilst reflecting the specifics of the place in which this new piece will reside: a museum collection in an English urban setting.
Judges 1 and Judges 2 are autonomous pieces of work that also operate as one continuous, open-ended dialogue. In each, an accumulation of objects, sketches, photographs and materials are laid out in a carefully choreographed sequence, stretching
the length of abutting tables. Their shared title, The Judges, is a reference to William Hogarth’s work The Bench. For Judges 1 Mackie printed the Hogarth images onto long scrolls and poured watercolour down the length of the roll; the paint pots were also part of the final work. But in both, the title hints at the idea of time as a judge or watchful presence over mankind’s impact on the earth.