00:00I'm Duncan Chappell. I'm Librarian and Collections Manager at Glasgow School of Art.
00:04We're in the reading room of the Library's Special Collections at Glasgow School of Art.
00:09This is where we keep all of our valuable and rare materials.
00:12And today we're here to look at a collection that's recently come to the school
00:16from Jeremy Cooper of about over 2,000 items of artist's ephemera.
00:23Jeremy's been collecting this artist's ephemera since probably about the 1990s.
00:28He was a very close personal friend with lots of the young British artists of that time,
00:32people like Gary Hume and Tracey Emin.
00:36And he lived in Shoreditch in London at that time,
00:40where many of the other artists lived at the same time.
00:44And he became very good friends with them, very close friends with them.
00:47And he collected this material as part of his relationships with them.
00:51So a lot of it's incredibly rare material that won't be available anywhere else.
00:56Small little private view cards, exhibitions, personal letters, and so forth.
01:01So by artist's ephemera, we mean transitory publications,
01:07smaller publications such as leaflets, private view cards,
01:10posters that may have accompanied gallery exhibits.
01:14And historically, this kind of stuff just hasn't been collected,
01:17unlike, say, published books, which are well documented and collected.
01:20This tends to be stuff that people just take home and then it gets thrown away.
01:25It doesn't get collected.
01:26But Jeremy has been really astute in keeping all of this stuff together.
01:32And now, of course, it's incredibly rare.
01:34You know, some of these private view cards to early exhibitions,
01:37say of Tracey Emin, for example, probably are going to be held in very few places in the UK.
01:43What's great about the collection is it includes lots of artist multiples.
01:47So we have some bottles of beer here, for example.
01:51That were produced in very limited edition for the company Beck's Beers
01:58by artists including Tim Noble and Sue Webster.
02:02This one here is by Sam Taylor Wood.
02:05We have a bottle of wine here that was produced to celebrate the
02:10China 1993 exhibition by Gilbert and George,
02:14accompanied with the menu of the banquet that they ate,
02:19including dishes such as braised shark's fin soup, which I think is a bit of an acquired taste.
02:26There are some lovely, beautiful objects like this.
02:29This is a set of six hand-painted porcelain apples by the artist Annie Galatio,
02:36who was born in Paisley, actually up here in Scotland.
02:40And this is an edition of six,
02:43of which obviously we have one of the copies,
02:46really beautifully hand-painted and hand-decorated porcelain apples.
02:50And the apple was quite talismanic for Annie Galatio and her work.
02:55And it also includes manuscript materials such as this,
02:59which is an invite from Tracey Emin to Jeremy Cooper,
03:04asking him to attend her birthday party,
03:07but to not wear any grey or black or beige,
03:11and to wear something bright,
03:12because she's fed up looking at people wearing beige and black and grey.
03:17Jeremy, I think, has been looking to donate his collections across the piece to lots of institutions.
03:24So he has made donations to other institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum,
03:29the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
03:32And he reached out to us, looking at the potential for us to take the artist's ephemera.
03:38He thought that the Glasgow School of Art would be a really good place to hold his material,
03:43being a working arts school,
03:45it being available to current and future generations of artists to look at and work from.
03:52So we entered into a negotiation,
03:54and Jeremy very kindly donated this collection to us,
03:59which we're really thrilled to have.
04:01Jeremy has always enjoyed coming up to Glasgow.
04:05He views it as a city with a really important and lively arts scene.
04:13Although he has been mostly based in London, I think, throughout his collecting career,
04:17he would make regular trips up to Glasgow to see various exhibitions.
04:21And he does talk about encountering the work of people like Douglas Gordon, for example,
04:27for the first time, and how revelationary that was to him.
04:33He also has connections right up to contemporary day, actually.
04:36I mean, the recent Turner Prize winner, Jasleen Kaur,
04:40who is a Glasgow School of Art graduate,
04:45rented studio space from Jeremy down in Somerset.
04:51So it's a connection to Glasgow that he has kept throughout the years.
04:56And I think he just felt that it was a really fitting place
04:59that this stuff, some of it collected in Glasgow, should come back to the city.
05:03We will be concentrating on the next year in cataloguing the collection,
05:08getting it processed so that we actually know what we have.
05:11Obviously, over 2,000 items,
05:15no doubt we'll discover all kinds of hidden gems while we're processing and cataloguing them.
05:21In the meantime, the collection is available to researchers or students
05:26here in the reading room of the Library's Special Collections.
05:31And we'll be looking, hopefully, at exhibitions in the future,
05:36either here at Glasgow School of Art or with other institutions.
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