About Me

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I led workshops at the British Library2003-2019, on literature, language, art, history, and the culture of the book; and now teach the the English language at educational institutions, particularly the Bishopsgate Institute, online and in-person. I research language usage during the First World War, and lead the Languages and the First World War project. Author of Discovering Words, Discovering Words in the Kitchen, Evolving English Explored, Team Talk - sporting words & their origins, Trench Talk - the Language of the First World War (with Peter Doyle); How to Cure the Plague; The Finishing Touch; and Words and the First World War; Tommy French. As an artist I work in printmaking, performance, public engagement, curating and intervention; and I lead museum tours.

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Wednesday 25 January 2017

The Nature of Intervention - Nymans, 2012                   


This essay was first published in the catalogue for Unravelling Nymans, curated by Unravelled Arts, at Nymans House and Garden, may-October 2012 


Let us accept straightaway that Nymans is preserved in a way that renders it very different from how it was when people lived here. It is not the business of the National Trust to pretend that we are all invisible, and that the real inhabitants have gone out for the day. As we walk round enjoying objects and views we may not see ourselves in the space; but our presence is an intervention, and the nature of the site as it is depends on our engagement with it. The positioning of new artworks within a site like this disrupts our vision, putting us in a position where we can acknowledge our own presence.


Nymans is a site which is about change; the destruction of one form on the site has created space for a different form, a number of times, both deliberately and through the agency of catastrophe. How do we read the removal of the pre-nineteenth-century house, the extension of the Italianate villa, the replacement of this with a medievalist building? How do we understand the burnt part of the house beyond the locked door, which confounds our sense of space; is it outside or inside, is it predominantly resentful, romantic, challenging, anomalous or mournful? Do we read it as documentation of history, as a reference to the Gothic, as a forlorn hope for reconstruction?


In this context, where the site is a palimpsest on which people and fire have inscribed new identities for the building and its surroundings, proposing different kinds of engagement, the insertion of works of intervention and alteration is entirely appropriate. It is not only the house’s own identity, but also the engagement and reactions to it by the former owners that invites engagements and reactions from others. 


Works made to engage with a site can enlighten, inform, critique, outrage, delight and amuse; they can lead us to look at things and places in new ways, and they can ask us to look at our own way of looking – even in leading us to reject them they help us to confirm our own standpoint and opinions. Making work that reacts to and is situated within a site of heritage is bound to excite comment, often discomfort, annoyance and frustration. Both as makers and viewers we should note these feelings, and use them as a space to look at our expectations, to consider and note the relationships others have with things and places that mean something to us.


My own work has involved taking things apart, undoing worked textiles before I rework them; this is not preliminary to the work, it is part of the work. Making work that involves a certain amount of destruction of ‘heritage’ material opens a door to many difficult questions. Having initiated the process of alteration, can I complain if someone takes my work and alters it? – No, I cannot. What gives me the right to change another’s work? – The same right with which I change anything in the world. Does not presenting this kind of work here run counter to the role of the host organisation as a custodian of heritage for posterity? Art is in a position to ask new questions about how we relate to the culture we operate in; we should not allow the concern that things will not survive for posterity to prevent us from asking those questions in the present. What about the cultural value of the thing I am altering? – The intervention shifts its cultural value, inviting new ways of thinking about both the item and the structure of cultural value surrounding it.


Destruction has a recognised place in contemporary art. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg was making work that involved erasing his own drawings; fascinated at that time by the work of Willem de Kooning, he asked that artist for a work that he could erase. De Kooning gave him a crayon and ink drawing; it took Rauschenberg a month to almost completely remove all the marks, creating Erased De Kooning Drawing. In 1960 Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself, as it was designed to do, and in 2001 Michael Landy destroyed all 7226 of his belongings, including a Tinguely drawing, in the work Break Down. In 2003 the Chapman Brothers exhibited Insult to Injury, a ‘rectification’ of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings (1937 printing), the heads of the subjects being overdrawn with the heads of puppies and clowns, in what Jonathan Jones described as ‘an extension of his despair’. All of these works are reactions to something already in existence, reactions that build upon that existence and create something which was not there before. They are works which are wholly related to the context of the material they developed from.


The irrevocable works just considered operate through a complex series of actions and marks. In the case of my interventionist embroidery works made for Nymans the undoing is irretrievable, but the marks made are infinitely removable, like digital marks; the mark made is patently a committed three-dimensional thing, the thread inserting itself through the ground, the mark tying itself down.  The act of taking away, seen through the deliberately left marks of undoing, is a greater irretrievability, a deliberate act marked by a trace, a mark of memory; the unmaking is permanent, while the making is capable of being changed.


The works I have made for this exhibition are clearly specific to this site, but the items I start with, having histories before they come to me, have become sites themselves; as such the context of my working on them has to be considered. There is no question of avoiding the issue of gender in this medium. It is fundamental to the process that we should be aware that embroidery in the West has traditionally been undertaken by women, and my intervention as a named individual thus is a male intervention in a female site. I am working with a clear knowledge of, and a clear reference to, the embroidery school set up by Maud Messel, in which local girls were taught embroidery, with the help of some of the housekeeping staff of Nymans. Given the context of the work, the process of named intervention in embroidery here turns works of ‘craft’ into works of ‘art’, explicitly authored, and with the rights of authorship.



Yet, despite the anonymity of the makers who originally created the objects I work on, the context of all of these handmade embroideries is that they were once closely associated with individuals, and mostly became family possessions. The process of becoming commodities detached them from those associations, rendering them more able to accommodate new stories, imagined, adapted, projected or transferred. In this sense they are ‘rehoused’ into a new context of meaning; very domestic artworks given a new home.


Each of these works must then be about loss, the loss of the previous work or the loss of the empty clean space. The work I Don’t Want To Lose You, while referring to the medievalist plaque, also relates to the loss of the work on the cushion, necessary to make the new work just as much as it is about the history of loss within Nymans itself, the desire not to lose the medieval, and the desire not to lose the part of the house destroyed by fire. We carry the past around with us. Ultimately these works open up a conversation with the role of the National Trust, which alters the route towards entropy by preserving sites such as Nymans, allowing the continuing questioning of how we see and know this aspect of the world and of ourselves.







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