What follows is background and supporting visual information for my Arts Council England funding bid for a new residency and exhibition project ‘Other Wise the Album’ for Dorich House museum, Kingston.

The material included below aligns with the information provided in my ACE application form which outlines the project as a whole and how it sits within my recent and ongoing visual art practice. It comprises of the following:

• images of two of Edouard Vuillard’s five paintings that make up ‘The Album’ suite
• summary information and documentation of relevant previous projects, N scale (2017), Collateral (2021) and Cosmus (2024)
• Dorich House context imagery, collages and mock-ups for initial proposal to the museum
• initial studio experimentation in order to test out viability of proposal

The Album (2 of 5 paintings)

Related Previous Projects

N scale 

N scale takes as its starting point a fire that took place in a factory in Thailand on 10th May 1993, killing 188 people, mostly young migrant women. The factory was owned by Kader Industrial, a global multinational that makes toys and miniature rail accessories for Western markets – specifically ‘n scale’ plastic shipping containers, sold in the UK under the Graham Farish/Bachmann brand. The work aims to recuperate the tragic and needless death of these victims, through a ‘living memorial’ that stages remembering as an act of critique and reflection.

As a project N scale borrows from the tripartite form of many public memorials comprising therefore of a sited memorial sculpture, commemorative events and a membership organisation.

The project invites live participation from audience/viewers in the commemorative performances and ongoing recruitment of ‘rememberers’ to the N scale Inoperative Association. The process of recruiting members takes place during performances and exhibitions.

Working with me on N scale were performers, Kirsten Lavers, Max K Weaver, and Andrew Mitchelson, musician Clair Le Couteur and Thai translator Petnoi Petsophonsakul, with additional production support from Andrew Mitchelson. The project was also supported by a research trip to Thailand funded through AIDF funding (ACE and British Council). Subsequently the work has been shown as part of exhibitions in the UK and Ireland and most recently in my solo exhibition Cosmus at LCGA, Ireland (2024).

Collateral

Collateral, was a site-based, participatory work for Queen Street Mill in Burnley, Lancashire. Commissioned by Super Slow Way for British Textile Biennial 2021, the work commemorates the hundreds of workers who die because they work in factories and sweatshops that supply the global garment industry. It is inspired by, and takes its form from, a lacework panel commemorating the Battle of Britain, held in the textile collection at Gawthorpe Hall, Burnley.  Working with local embroiderers and the participation of over 120 people from across the UK, this textile work was reimagined as a new hand-embroidered whitework panel, 450 x 163 cms in size.
I worked closely with Rabia Sharif as a lead embroiderer on this project and hope to work with her again on Other Wise the Album in one of the ‘video portrait’ films.

The textile sculpture was accompanied by a videowork which brought together selected transcripts from an interview with Rasamee Supaem, survivor of the Kader Industrial fire, interviewed by the artist in 2018, footage from Queen Street Mill itself, and recordings of folk duo Lunatraktors improvising overtone singing and dance clogging in the loom shed of the mill museum.

The work was subsequently shown as part of group exhibition, Cotton: Land, Labour and Body at the Crafts Council Gallery, London (2022) curated by Uthra Rajgopal, and in my solo exhibition Cosmus at LCGA, Ireland 2024.

Cosmus

COSMUS was a solo exhibition of selected works from the last fifteen years of my career, alongside a new sculptural installation of the same title, on show at Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland 2024.

The new commission, Cosmus was inspired by the enmeshment of female figures, textiles and furniture in the late 19^th century paintings of Edouard Vuillard. The work is a universe of things set in motion with each other, made predominantly from materials stored and left over from the artist’s previous projects. It continues my engagement with textiles but moves it into a more domestic register and at the same time brings this into a broader relation to space, materialities, sculpture and temporality.

The objects include sound compositions made from improvisational samples commissioned by the artist from ongoing collaborators, Lunatraktors. Additionally a new videowork was made during the exhibition from collaborative experimentation in the gallery space with dancer Arianna Guasso.

The work was supported by funding from Arts Council England (DYCP), AN Artists Bursary and Irish Arts Council.

Dorich House (context/mock-ups/collages)

The experimental work shown above has informed the development of my Arts Council England funding application (conceptual, financial planning, production planning, project timeline) and provides a very solid foundation from which to refine and deliver the project successfully.
It has not in any way led to final works and so is all experimentation that will be developed further and refined once the project starts for real with more in-depth research and engagement with the context and collections at Dorich House, further studio work and new collaborative encounters as outlined in my proposal.