Place, People and Living Memory

The Future is a Time After The Present in Place, People and Living Memory

This story takes its lead from an artwork at the National Portrait Gallery, London, titled: 'The World Anti-Slavery Convention 1840', made by the history painter and diarist Benjamin Robert Haydon. The inclusion of Elizabeth Pease in the delegates depicted encourages further consideration of the central role of her advocacy for abolitionism. Born (1807) into a Quaker family of wool merchants in Darlington, the entitlements and civic values of her time permeate the eloquence of her Suffragist identity and her tireless campaigning for female emancipation. This exhibition unpicks a few threads from the storehouse of this history to trace the slow turn of change and reformation in human affairs then and since.

Place, People and Living Memory is a contemporary storehouse of ideas depicted in painting, photography, film and audio visual arts in the mode of an installation with the intent to show rather than tell. The work to be done with this exhibition, in part, is to reveal the lived experience of collision between privilege and oppression. The installation incorporates: a photo-essay; current practice in painting; digital projection; audio visual work and performance events.

The Future is a Time After The Present
“I am part of all that I have met” as written by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem Ulysses encapsulates some of my thoughts in writing the essay on Jo Spence. If we are lucky, in time we arrive at a stage when circumstances around us of a life lived precipitates a time of reflection; to acknowledge and identify that we are the sum of all our experiences and people we have met. Jo Spence’s work came from her lived life, and The Final Project (1991-1992) came from her impending death. For this, she looked to her past and used negatives from her extensive archive. In writing this essay on Spence, making public the content of our tutorial reports is a means through which for me to reflect on the person and artist that I have become; the how and why.

In the same way, the video work The Future is a Time After the Present (2024), reflects on the journey from one stage of life to another. Shot on location in Dungeness a promontory on the Kent coast, a figure traverses a salty pool of water created by the sea tides amongst the shingle. The figure resorts to swimming across to get to the other side. I first visited Dungeness as a teenager in the autumn of 1983. It was the first field trip our tutors took us on at the start of my undergraduate fine art degree course at Maidstone College of Art. Forty years later I find myself returning to this place where I entered a new phase of my life all those years ago to make a work in hindsight of the person and artist that I have become.

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