For Demonstration Purposes

Subtle Subtitles #6 / The Wyrtweard's Tale (The Gardener's Tale), 2025

For Demonstration Purposes brings together artefacts, objects, samples and test pieces made by creative educators from different educational settings... this diverse exhibition highlights how teaching is more than the transference of knowledge but a creative activity in its own right. Curator: Anya Beaumont.

Exhibition Description
Teaching: Improvised performative masks, constructed from household materials including ribbons, bamboo, sunglasses, fabric scraps, and cable ties, occupy an unusual position in design education: simultaneously absurd object, pedagogical device, and material provocation. First conceived during the pandemic for virtual teaching and subsequently adapted for in-person delivery, these masks are central to the Subtle Subtitles workshop series, developed by Colin Priest for MA Interior and Spatial Design students at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.

Each mask frames a series of interlocking enquiries: into the playful design of film space, inclusive media-making, multilingualism, and the creative potential of generative translation software. Working with digitised objects from UAL's Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Collection, a historic archive assembled to teach the principles of good design through object encounter, students produce onomatopoeic, subtitled responses to deliberately glitched virtual recordings. Here digital imperfection becomes an aesthetic and ethical position, locating the work in questions of access, embodiment, and sensory translation.
The mask mediates between body and camera, staging improvised, embodied storytelling. Examining: how do we design for sensory experiences other than our own? What does an object sound like, and how might that sound be notated, translated, shared?

Each annual iteration demands a new mask and generates fresh student film responses, ensuring the object remains alive to contemporary concerns.

Practice: The masks migrate from the classroom into an expanded field of practice-based research, where their logic of translation, material improvisation, and archival encounter continues to generate new work. The Wyrtweard's Tale (meaning The Gardener's Tale) draws on this methodology to explore connections between Geoffrey Chaucer's Middle English, contemporary AI translation software, and the designed landscapes of the medieval imagination. Working across language, moving image, and costume, the work asks what it means to translate spatial worlds across centuries of linguistic and material drift. Like the mask, The Wyrtweard's Tale treats translation as a design act: imprecise, embodied, generative, and alert to what is lost and gained in the crossing. It finds in Chaucer a willing accomplice: a writer who delighted in mistranslation, borrowed voices, and the productive muddle of languages rubbing against one another. That spirit of mischief, of meaning made slippery on purpose, runs through the work.

Associated Current Practice Artefact: The Wyrtweard's Tale (The Gardener's Tale), 2025
Link to short silent film: https://vimeo.com/1075295980

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