Begun in 1978, my collection has evolved over the years to incorporate a wide variety of material and, in addition to the personal pleasure it provides, may be used as a source of reference by individuals wishing to learn more about holography and the many different ways in which it can be used.
Students and designers can visit by appointment to see examples of creative holography, collectors can view works from an international range of artists, curators can select pieces for forthcoming exhibitions and, in addition, I offer a consultancy service for companies wishing to use holography commercially.
When I first became involved with holography, I joined forces with a group of fellow enthusiasts to promote what we saw as a medium with great potential for both fine art and commercial applications. Our first initiative was to create a production company, SEE 3 (HOLOGRAMS) LTD., for the origination of commercial display holograms and a gallery, THE HOLOGRAM PLACE, as a showplace for what we produced and for work by other holographers around the world. The unsold stock from the gallery, Europe’s first devoted to holography, formed the basis for my collection and included work by artists working with holography, a selection of commercial images and an assortment of holographic ephemera. This diversity of material has characterised the collection as it has developed for, although I have concentrated more in recent years on work by artists, I have also continued to accumulate commercial artifacts and thus have succeeded in creating an archive which illustrates most of the ways in which holography has developed over the two and a half decades in which I have been associated with it.
One of the reasons for maintaining this collection is to use it to make holography accessible to a wider audience and, before I started Gallery 286, I personally staged a number of exhibitions in public galleries showing the work of artists using holography and also endeavoured to encourage other galleries and museums to show work from the collection.
Some of the material you will find in this website comes from the catalogue I created for one of these exhibitions, 3x8+1, which contained twenty five pieces (three each by eight different artists plus one other). All of the artists included had been students at the Royal College of Art during the ten years it had a holography facility and the selection is representative of the pioneering work that was being made in Britain at that time.
3x8+1 was initally shown at the private gallery of St.Paul’s school in London and subsequently formed the basis of exhibitions at Aberdeen Art Gallery, The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford and Technorama in Switzerland.
At the end of 1997 I moved to a new building which houses my permanent archive and has a small private gallery (Gallery 286) in which I show selections from the collection and stage exhibitions by individuals and groups of artists working with holography and other media. The purpose of this website is to document those exhibitions, to give a taste of what is in my collection, and to introduce it to a still wider audience by means of the Internet.
Jonathan Ross receives the Saxby Medal. Read more.
