Draft:Hugh Stoddart

Hugh Stoddart (born 28 June 1947) is a British writer, known mainly for his screenplays for film and television.

Career as a Curator

Stoddart moved from London to Devon in 1972 to take up a new appointment at South West Arts, one of a number of regional arts associations at the time that were funded jointly from local government and from the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was their first Visual Arts Officer and travelled widely across the region in support of artists and galleries; he also began an expansion of the work covered by the organisation, developing support for craft and then film.

In 1978 Stoddart was appointed Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and achieved a move to new premises. Following a conversion at minimal cost, this allowed an expansion of the programme both in the number of exhibitions and the scale of work that could be shown. He travelled both in the USA and Europe to invite artists to show their work, giving first exhibitions in the UK to Bernard Bazile, Chris Burden, Jochen Gerz, Noel Harding, Pieter Laurens Mol, Dennis Oppenheim, and Agnes Denes. Oppenheim’s sculpture Vibrating Forest was later restored and shown by the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds. Denes’ work was subsequently toured to the Institute of Contemporary Arts London.

Stoddart encouraged UK artists at the start of their careers such as Paul Graham, Mali Morris and Hugh O’Donnell. He also included in the programme artists working in the area broadly referred to as installations art such as Ron Haselden, as well as those engaged in performance art. His policy was to have more than one exhibition on in the gallery at any one time, each lasting rarely more than six weeks. Details of his programme and that of his successor, Antonia Payne, are recorded in an Ikon Gallery publication As Exciting As We Can Make It.

Stoddart left the Ikon Gallery at the end of his three year contract, and moved back to London where he worked as a freelance art critic in the early 1990s. His reviews were published mainly in Contemporary Visual Arts, a magazine then edited by Keith Patrick.

Filmography

Year	Title	Genre	Credit
2017	Waiting for You	Feature	Co-writer
2014	Moth Dust	Video	Director, Writer, Producer
2013	My Passage Through a Brief Unity in Time	Short	Writer
2010	Lifetime	Video	Director, Story, Producer
2007	Eucalyptus	Short	Writer
2002	Dalziel and Pascoe (Series 7, Episode 5 - Dialogues of the Dead: Part 1, Episode 6 - Dialogues of the Dead: Part 2	TV Series	Screenplay
1997	The Mill on the Floss	TV Movie	Screenplay
1992	The Big Battalions (5 episodes)	TV Mini Series	Writer
1988	We Think the World of You	Feature	Screenplay
1986	Hard Travelling Screen Two (Series 2, Episode 12)	TV Series	Writer
1983	To the Lighthouse	TV Movie	Writer
1982	Remembrance	Feature	Screenplay
1981	The Trespasser	TV Movie	Writer
1978	Begging the Ring		Co-writer