Join curator Oriole Cullen, Professor Annamari Vänskä and artist Ehryn Torrell as they look at the contribution both art and fashion make to artistic innovation and creative expression.

Who are the artists sitting on the intersection of both fields? What is the relationship between fashion and art? Are there benefits and negatives of the two fields being associated? To what extent are these two creative industries linked?

In this discussion, chaired by academic and critic Shahidha Bari, the panel – which includes Professor of fashion research at Aalto University, Annamari Vänskä, and curator of Modern Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Oriole Cullen and contemporary artist, Ehryn Torrell – springboards from Helene Schjerfbeck’s interest in fashion magazines and style, to investigate how art and fashion influence each other.

They’ll be looking past the traditional partnerships between luxury fashion brands and artists (such as Elsa Schapiarelli x Salvador Dalí or Longchamp x Tracey Emin RA), to contemporary genre-crossing collaborations, where artists are on the fringes of both disciplines, and discuss what the future of fashion and art collaborations will look like.

Shahidha Bari (Chair) is a critic, academic and broadcaster working in the fields of literature, philosophy and visual culture. She studied at Cambridge, teaches art history and cultural theory at Queen Mary, and is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the LSE. She was winner of the Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism (2015) and she writes regularly for the Financial Times, Frieze and the Guardian among others. She features frequently on BBC Radio 4, and presents BBC Radio 3’s flagship arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking. Her book, *Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes will be published by Cape in June 2019.

Oriole Cullen is curator of Modern Fashion and Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she has worked on exhibitions such as Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, Ballgowns: British Glamour and Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. She also oversees the Museum’s Fashion in Motion programme working with contemporary fashion designers to stage a series of live fashion events held within the Museum. Prior to joining the V&A she was curator for Dress and Decorative Arts at the Museum of London. She has published widely on the subject of fashion and history of dress and recent publications include Francis Marshall: Drawing Fashion and Christian Dior.

Ehryn Torrell is an artist who works in painting, collage and textiles. She is interested in visual culture and how it imprints human bodies, engaging activities like mark-making, collage, scanning, printing, and stitching as forms of resistance. In her current work, she creates collage with paint and imagery torn from British Vogue magazines to look carefully at an archive and its portrayal of gender, race and sexuality. These collages take the form of fragmented compositions, some of which are digitally printed as textiles, where material and imagery are interrogated further with embroidery and quilting. She is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies and grants, most recently from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has exhibited internationally, including The Future is Female at Dellasposa (London), the touring solo exhibition Self-Similar organised by St. Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax, Canada), The Painting Project by Galerie de L’UQAM (Montreal) and exhibitions at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (China), Art Gallery of Guelph (Canada), Museu de Arte de Joinville (Brazil), Gerald Moore Gallery (UK), and Grimsby Public Art Gallery (Canada).