Harry (2013) animation, Bank Street Arts, Sheffield.
Harry
Harry is an animated portrait of Harry Brearley, the Sheffield metallurgist who invented stainless steel. Made for a group exhibition at Bank Street Arts, the portrait was hung above the old fireplace in the gallery — a deliberate nod to the tradition of formal portraiture in domestic and institutional spaces.
The animation draws on two things simultaneously: the long-standing phenomenon of portrait eyes that seem to follow you around the room, a trick of classical painting that creates an uncanny sense of being watched — and the anarchic, cut-and-paste energy of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where archive images are yanked out of their original context and made to do something they were never meant to do. Watch carefully.
Harry was the beginning of a whole body of work using animated archive imagery. In 2015 it led to a larger commission for the Festival of the Mind, developed in collaboration with the National Fairground Archives and Greentop Circus — bringing together historical circus and fairground imagery and setting it in motion in ways that were both irreverent and affectionate, finding the strangeness already latent in the archive.