Collection: Ed Herring

Ed Herring (born 1946) is a British artist whose work in the early 1970s engaged with participation, administration and the systems through which art is distributed and encountered. His 1970 work Proposition — 400 postcards stored in a metal filing cabinet, available for gallery visitors to take — used the formats of bureaucratic storage and postal distribution as both subject and medium. The work proposed the gallery as a point of dispersal rather than display, and the artwork as something that completes itself through circulation rather than contemplation. Herring’s practice sits within the broader British conceptual context of the period, where administrative systems, participation and the dematerialisation of the object were active concerns.