Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-Century Britain

Studio Voices explores the multi-layered experiences of modern and contemporary British artists in their own words, drawing on the author’s original research in the Artists’ Lives audio archive at the British Library.

Michael Bird’s fascinating oral history of the lives and working practices of artists over the last century, extracted from the huge and growing archive of artists’ interviews recorded since 1990, allows us to eavesdrop on artists’ life-story conversations, which range through creative practice and professional achievements, childhood memories, family life, relationships, and unexpected, incidental epiphanies of self-awareness.

The Artists’ Lives project was established in 1990 as part of National Life Stories, the UK’s national oral history archive, which is based at the British Library.