Our lectures always start at 11:00 on a Tuesday. It is usually the last Tuesday of the month but do look at the actual details as that sometimes changes. The lectures are held at the Pavilion Arts Centre in Buxton with the Pavilion Gardens Car Park (off Burlington Road) near by.
The GPO Film Unit and The Avant – Garde ‘This is the night mail crossing the Border, bringing the cheque and the postal order…’,‘Nightmail’ (1936)
28 October 2025
Words by WH Auden and music by Benjamin Britten loudly announced the beginning of ‘poetic realism’ and the Documentary film movement. The General Post Office Film Unit (1933) established an exciting collaboration of artists, photographers, composers, anthropologists, poets and animators. Together we will explore Nightmail (1936) and Len Lye’s hugely inventive camera lens, A Colour Box (1935). The social realism advocacy of Director John Grierson’s has left a powerful legacy which can be easily identified in the recent films of Ken Loach and Danny Boyle.
John Francis
Fashionable Folds: The Fan as the Ultimate Fashion Accessory
18 November 2025
Fans have been used for millennia, principally for cooling but also for religious and ceremonial purposes. In Europe, they later developed into a ubiquitous accessory for the fashionable elite. Fans were produced to commemorate births, marriages and deaths, were decorated with scenes of love and pastoral scenes of idyllic aristocratic life. They were also used as a conduit for communication through their handling and the subject matter painted upon their storied folds. But most of all, fans were a tangible marker of taste, status and wealth, and, when worn alongside gowns, jewels and tiaras, were akin to a sceptre with all its majestic connotations.
This lecture explores not only the rise of the folding fan in Europe as fashion’s most statement-worthy accessory but also the artistry and craftsmanship of fan making in relation to the changing fashionable trends in dress throughout Europe from the 16th to the 20th century.
Scott Schiavone
Joseph Wright of Derby and the Men and Art of the Lunar Society
27 January 2026
In an age of discovery where science and industry went hand-in-hand, 18th century England saw not only the flowering of the Industrial Revolution, but also that of the self-made man; who came not from money but from industry. It was a time of gentlemen’s clubs, in their true original meaning rather that the corruption of this term we unfortunately experience today, and one of these clubs would become synonymous with investigation and discovery characterised by the individuals that were associated with it. The industrialists amongst these men would be, in their time, referred to as philosophers practising what we would now call joined-up thinking, eventually we would invent a new name for them – scientists however, they would call themselves the Lunar Society.
Leslie Primo
The Brilliance of Bernini’s Sculpture
24 February 2026
Dramatic struggles, speaking portraits, ecstatic nuns and dynamic fountains are among the works discussed in this lecture. We will survey Bernini’s career as a sculptor from his beginnings as a child prodigy to his final years managing a prolific workshop. We look at the important role played by his patrons and champions, his techniques and his subject matter.
Antonia Gatward Cevizli
The influence of Japanese Woodcut on Western Art
24 March 2026
When Japan’s borders were opened to the West in 1868 there was a huge surge of interest in all things Japanese in the West, particularly in Paris. Ukiyo-e prints were collected avidly by the leading Impressionist painters of the day who ‘borrowed’ wholesale from their asymmetric compositions, flowing lines, bright colours and subject matter.
In this lecture Carol explores how the Japanese aesthetic revolutionised western art in the late 19th century, and how a new wave of artists today have brought a deeper understanding of the mokuhanga technique into contemporary art.
Carol Wilhide Justin
Impressions of Gardens: Gardens of the Impressionists
28 April 2026
Planting and painting, cultivating and creating: inspired and influenced by their dedication to painting ‘en plein air’ artists of the Impressionist Movement had an especial relationship with gardens and landscape, most famously expressed by Claude Monet (1840-1926) at Giverny.
This talk explores that relationship drawing on the wide range of gardens created and depicted by artists including Gustav Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frederick Carl Frieseke, and Pierre Bonnard, placing Giverny and Monet in a wider perspective.
NOTE: 2026 is the centenary of the death of Claude Monet.
Twigs Way
“Imagine If You Will…”: creativity and originality in the age of Artificial Intelligence
19 May 2026
Synthesising recent research into the nature of human creativity and current concerns about the impact of machine learning on originality, this very topical lecture focuses on how original thought and innovation are affected by the growing application of Artificial Intelligence across all academic disciplines. Justin considers how AI offers great advantages as a tool in scientific and medical research, for social scientists, and also perhaps for many working in the humanities, with exciting applications in painting, sculpture, architecture, video gaming and film. It concludes with a consideration as to whether AI and machine learning are making humans redundant in the creative process.
Justin Reay