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The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets of a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe
No full textIn 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.
Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.
Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.
This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear
Exhibition text for Hannah Waldron's Sprinkle Water on the Web" solo exhibition at Galerie Tator
Get PDFCommissioned to produce a piece of creative writing to serve for the press release for Cornwall-based artist Hannah Waldron's solo exhibiton "Sprinkle Water on the Web" at Galerie Tator, Lyon
FOUR ON THE FLOOR | SIX IN THE AIR
Get PDFFOUR ON THE FLOOR | SIX IN THE AIR, 2023
Live durational performance 29 July. Exhibition, 4 August to 16 September at Harbour House, Kingsbridge, Devon.
FOUR ON THE FLOOR | SIX IN THE AIR is a human-operated, tech-supported crochet machine directed by birds.
At Harbour House the live work was divided into 6 episodes, each lasting 45 minutes. Taking place across 6 different locations around the town, the performance created an exhibition out of the artefacts and trace elements left behind.
During each episode a birder reported to the gallery on the movement of birds at their location. The artist decoded the live commentary into a series of instructions and stitches for crochet. These instructions were then fashioned into an ever-evolving pattern by a team of crocheters working with the artist in real-time.
As well as finding form in different coloured yarns and knotted textures, the moves and stitches from each birding location were archived by a team of record keepers working in tandem on a large, 7-metre blackboard at the far end of the gallery.
Together the birds, birders, crocheters, broadcast crew, record keepers and the artist formed their own fragile working machine. Human-operated and supported by technology, the machine remained essentially avian. Its pace, shape and particular rhythm operating in service to the will and evolving patterns of water, woodland and garden birds moving around the town.
As an artwork the FOUR ON THE FLOOR | SIX IN THE AIR machine is uncomfortably live. It is open to the unknown, moving forward without knowing what is coming next. It tolerates misdirection and the curious slippages of translation as information passes through its various chambers and moving parts. It is as interested in the processes of making as what is made, leaving visible the machinations and turning cogs of its construction to locate its own particular language.
FOUR ON THE FLOOR | SIX IN THE AIR is also a portrait of the town that hosts it, with members of the local community adopting roles that support its production. The traces of its human protagonists as well as their avian counterparts can be found in its workings and final expression.
KEYWORDS
Liveness | Performance | Crochet | Chalkboards | Birdwatching | Translation Dialogue | Graphic Scores | Notation | Community | Socially Engaged Practice | Coding | Error | Rules & Instructions | Archiving | Artist as Producer | Post Human Landscap
'The Shock of the Old' - Solo Sculpture Exhibition. 2023 - Wells and Mendip Museum, Somerset.
Get PDFWhy as artists do we persist with anachronistic models of display, collection and mark- making? I am researching anachronistic cultures of collecting and the accumulation and ordering of mnemonic materials in museums and those that many of us collate within sheds and attics through the lens of a sculptural art practice. With a particular focus on the use of taxidermy, diorama, natural history collection and archaeology I am interested in collapsed methodological boundaries and the potential that these liminal spaces provide for creative play, equivocal reading and message making.
These museological modes have emotional and associative worth because we link them to memories and moments, evidence of a lived experience and it is my position that the control of such materials betrays our vulnerability in the face of the inevitable entropy of all things, and by association an acknowledgement of mortality. I note that it is in the small things, the prosaic marginalia of a life lived, that the narrative is often told and am investigating the potential of the anachronistic creative device to compress or disrupt timelines.
These narrative mechanisms, as deployed by artists are playing with our interpretative functions, asking us to consider perhaps ethical, cultural or ecological factors in ways that the institutions of display habitually deflect us from. It is the very ‘out-of-time’ ness of these conventions that disrupt our assumptions and, by disabling linear readings, provide a new frame for story-telling. Knowingly deployed chronemic elements within visual arts practice can appear antithetical as they cause frictions with contemporary narratives and in so doing prompt interpretation and reappraisal
From A Story Point Of View: an interview with Rian Hughes
Get PDFRian Hughes is a graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist, writer and type designer who has worked extensively for the British and American advertising, music and comic book industries.
He has written and drawn comics for 2000AD and Batman: Black and White, and designed logos for The Avengers, The X-Men, Superman, record label Hedkandi, MTV and James Bond. He has edited books on mid-century lifestyle illustration and custom typography, and written on semiotics, culture, and collecting vintage science fiction pulps and paperbacks
Doctor Strange
Get PDFA book review of Blank Canvas. Art School Creativity from Punk to New Wave, Simon Strange (297pp, Intellect
The Bee Brick: building habitat for solitary bees
Get PDFThis article describes the process of designing the Bee Brick - a novel solution for integrating solitary bee habitats within buildings. Of the 250 species of bee in the UK, 90% are solitary bees of which 5% nest in cavities. Bees are key pollinators; this product provides nesting habitats for bees in suburban/urban communities. Existing bee nesting products tend to be ornamental and marketed by aesthetic considerations. Mainstream construction materials' primary function is to perform as structural components within the fabric of new buildings. These materials have been taken as a starting point to create habitat for bees displaced by the construction process. The Bee Brick provides a nesting site for solitary bees, adapting and rethinking how existing building components are used. Made using locally sourced recycled materials, it offers the dual function of being a construction material that also promotes biodiversity