2010
site-specific installation
Unravelling the Manor
Preston Manor
Brighton, UK
1 May – 25 July 2010
commissioned installation with remnant cosmetic facial peel, hand embroidery, mixed media
Trousseau is a series of sculptural interventions and activations for the group exhibition Unravelling the Manor at Preston Manor. They are constructed from remnant cosmetic facial peel and reference the body as it relates to the unique history of the manor. They are created by covering parts of my body with a gel facial masque. Once dried, I then peel the thin, plastic-like material off for use as fabric to construct the sculptures. The material has a fragile and transparent quality that retains a bodily form and an impression of the skin. The hooped embroideries in the Morning Room include excerpts from period publications as quoted in the Preston Manor visitor’s guide. The Edwardian era sources allude to prescribed cultural ideals as they relate to beauty, gender and domesticity: “be the embodiment of all that is simple and pure” (Lady’s World) and “let the walls be white so that by contrast our bodies might appear ruddy with health” (The House and Its Equipment). The hanging sculpture in the North-West Room contains glove forms peeled from my own hands. The sculptures are embellished with ruffles and buttons alluding to garment-like artifacts. The sculptures have a ghostly exo-skin quality that is evocative of the paranormal accounts in the manor. The objects function as metaphorical remnants of the past. I am interested in heirloom and domestic artifacts as loci of social and cultural constructions. These objects represent the way in which we invest our expectations of others and ourselves in the material world. There is an assumption in the heirloom tradition that one needs and wants the objects one receives. The shape of a unique hand in a glove challenges these notions. The receiver is attempting to “slip into the skin of another” that just may not fit. The ghosts here are not only paranormal but also cultural and historical.
Trousseau is a series of sculptural interventions and activations for the group exhibition Unravelling the Manor at Preston Manor. They are constructed from remnant cosmetic facial peel and reference the body as it relates to the unique history of the manor. They are created by covering parts of my body with a gel facial masque. Once dried, I then peel the thin, plastic-like material off for use as fabric to construct the sculptures. The material has a fragile and transparent quality that retains a bodily form and an impression of the skin. The hooped embroideries in the Morning Room include excerpts from period publications as quoted in the Preston Manor visitor’s guide. The Edwardian era sources allude to prescribed cultural ideals as they relate to beauty, gender and domesticity: “be the embodiment of all that is simple and pure” (Lady’s World) and “let the walls be white so that by contrast our bodies might appear ruddy with health” (The House and Its Equipment). The hanging sculpture in the North-West Room contains glove forms peeled from my own hands. The sculptures are embellished with ruffles and buttons alluding to garment-like artifacts. The sculptures have a ghostly exo-skin quality that is evocative of the paranormal accounts in the manor. The objects function as metaphorical remnants of the past. I am interested in heirloom and domestic artifacts as loci of social and cultural constructions. These objects represent the way in which we invest our expectations of others and ourselves in the material world. There is an assumption in the heirloom tradition that one needs and wants the objects one receives. The shape of a unique hand in a glove challenges these notions. The receiver is attempting to “slip into the skin of another” that just may not fit. The ghosts here are not only paranormal but also cultural and historical.
1 May – 25 July 2010
Preston Manor
Brighton, UK
An exciting new site-specific exhibition of twelve contemporary fine art and craft artists presented by Unravelled, a group of artists working with craft in alternative, innovative and conceptual ways. The exhibition is curated by Unravelled Directors Matt Smith, Polly Harknett and Caitlin Heffernan, and is the result of an 18 month collaboration between Unravelled and the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, supported by Arts Council England.
Subverting the overlap between fine art and craft within the context of Preston Manor the exhibition aims to inspire novel ideas and ways of seeing the world. Using both traditional and non-traditional techniques, the pieces showing at Preston Manor incorporate a broad range of materials from stitch and clay, to blood, glass, video and paper.
Preston Manor is both the inspiration and the exhibition space. The artists were commissioned to create new work specifically for this exhibition. The works have evolved in response to the house, its contents and the stories of the people who lived there and the staff that continue to work there. The pieces are designed to fit or juxtapose with their locations, encouraging the audience to look again and question what they see.
“By hitching up the Manor’s skirts and finding the stories hidden underneath, we’ve made this home a little less stately than it would like to believe itself to be.” Matt Smith, co-director of Unravelled and exhibiting Artist.
A symposium entitled; Art Concepts in Historical Contexts has been developed as part of the exhibition and will be held on Wednesday 12 May 2010. The symposium aims to open up debate on contemporary crafts and how artists, makers and curators are approaching issues surrounding site and historical contexts.
Unravelled is a group of artists working to provide a network and increase opportunities for makers involved in conceptual craft practice. The group aim to develop and promote contemporary crafts through exhibitions, education workshops, lectures and symposiums. The group and the exhibition has been supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.
Caitlin Heffernan, practicing artist and freelance curator.
Polly Harknett, freelance curator
Matt Smith, practicing artist and freelance curator
Catherine Bertola, James Hunting, Matt Smith, Laura Splan, Caitlin Heffernan, Emma Molony, Gavin Fry, Penny Green, Maria Rivans, Ingrid Plum, Louise Batchelor, Kira O’Reilly.
James Hunting- larger than life embroideries of the servants at the Manor
Catherine Bertola - following on from her work, exhibited in Out of the Ordinary; Spectacular Craft at the V&A London, the piece for Unravelling the Manor House, created using thousands of pins, explored the origins of female labour in lace making.
New York based artist Laura Splan uses cosmetic facial peel to make ethereal heirloom objects that reference the human form and as metaphorical remnants of the past.
Matt Smith subverts Ellen Stanford’s conversation piece in the Dining Room by installing spray painted bulldogs into a display of dogs of fo.
Featured on Channel 4’s Kirsty’s Homemade Home,
Emma Molony creates animated wallpapers using traditional printmaking techniques.
Art Concepts in Historical Contexts, Wednesday 12 May 2010
Speakers: Kate Stoddart, Lyndall Phelps and Catherine Bertola with Unravelled Directors Matt Smith and Polly Harknett.
The day is aimed at artists, curators, students, critics, academics and all those interested in discussing and finding out more about working in specific sites and the related exhibition Unravelling the Manor House.
One of the five sites under the care of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove, Preston Manor evokes the atmosphere of an Edwardian gentry house both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. Dating from c.1600, rebuilt in 1738 and substantially added to in 1905, the house and its contents give a rare insight into life during the early years of the 20th century. Visitors can explore more than twenty rooms over four floors, from the servants’ quarters, kitchens and butler’s pantry in the basement to the attic bedrooms and nursery on the top floor. The Manor also has walled gardens and a pets’ cemetery.
Preston Manor was a former manor house in Preston village, now a part of the wider Brighton & Hove area. The house was privately lived in until 1932 when it was given to the Brighton Corporation by its longest serving family, the Thomas-Stanfords. It is now a museum and exhibition space evoking upper-class life during the Edwardian period. The structure of the manor was built in the late 1700s. However, parts of its architecture date back much further, to around the 1200s. A two-roomed medieval building once stood on this site, and may have been a home connected with the local parish. This was later built on by Thomas Western, lord of the manor, and became the basement of a new property. Western erected a new two-storey block flanked by small pavilions. But the house took its present form in 1905 when designer Charles Peach added a dining room, servants’ wing, a widened entrance hall, and a veranda along the north front. The house is now a grade II listed building and has been restored to its Edwardian heyday, furnished with period pieces and collections from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Preston Manor is said to be one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Reports of ghost sightings have been recorded since the 19th century. Some of the most infamous are of a grey-clad woman, who was reported several times throughout the 20th century. She was seen in the boiler room of the house early in the 20th century. She was also spotted on the main staircase and on the roof by a firewatcher during WW2. A blonde woman, who allegedly revealed herself to be an excommunicated nun, told a séance that she was buried outside the house in unhallowed ground. A short time later two workmen who were clearing drains under the south terrace discovered the twisted skeleton of a woman of about fifty years of age, who was anything up to 400 years old. The skeleton was secretly reburied at the edge of the churchyard, after the vicar had refused her internment on the grounds that she was a Catholic. The ghost has not been reported since. A floating hand not attached to any arm, was reported by a guest of the house who saw it climbing a four-poster bed in a southwestern bedroom. A phantom child was also once seen riding a toy tractor on the croquet grounds to the back of the house.
Collaboration with the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, supported by Arts Council England.
