Finding Language for Working Class Stories

Lee, Louisa Finding Language for Working Class Stories. In: A Common Ground? Exploring Class, Culture and Collections. Annual Conference 2023, 12 - 14th April 2023, University College London.

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Abstract

After leaving art school in 1990, artist Mark Leckey did not make any artwork for the next ten years. Coming from a working class background, Leckey felt excluded by what he considered to be the intellectual language required to become a practicing artist: ‘I felt like I was lacking knowledge, intellectual reasoning – just lacking.’ The idea that art should have a conceptual and intellectual underpinning and framework stems from conceptual artists in the 1960s and 1970s who denounced formal art, such as painting and sculpture, for more conceptual methods focusing on processes and ideas over execution. Ironically, many of these conceptual artists were state-school educated and from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The amalgamation of art schools into polytechnics during the 1960s resulted in a greater access to higher education and encouraged a more interdisciplinary approach to producing art, as well as leading to art and design being recognised as an academic qualification. These educational and conceptual roots have fed into a conceptualism which underlines the practice-based research taught in art schools. Taking recent debates of access to the arts and research based-practice as a starting point, this paper will explore three artists’ works – Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Andrea Zimmerman’s Art Class (2020), and Simeon Barclay’s England’s Lost Camelot (2021) – in relation to the legacies of conceptual art practice on art education and production. It will explore how working class stories and histories are further complicated by the barriers to education which offer a such a vocabulary.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Divisions:	College of Creative Arts, Technology and Engineering > Creative Arts and Design
Depositing User:	Research and Knowledge Exchange Office Admin 1
Date Deposited:	27 Jul 2026 10:15
Last Modified:	27 Jul 2026 10:15
URI:	https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/21449

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