But we didn't see anything... (2015) Film installation, Lace Market Gallery, Nottingham.
Haunted: An Unexpected Revelation
Haunted: An Unexpected Revelation was my first solo exhibition, the result of a year-long artist-in-residence at the Lace Market Gallery in Nottingham — the same building where my great-great-grandfather designed lace over a hundred years before.
During the residency I gathered stories from women who had worked in the building in the final years of the industry, and spent time in the Nottingham Lace Archives researching my family's connection to the trade. The deeper I searched for evidence of my great-great-grandfather's creative hand, the more he seemed to fade and disappear — present only in stories passed down through my family.
The exhibition stretched across three locations in the city for a month: the Lace Market Gallery, a sound installation in the original Clock Tower of the Adams Building on Stoney Street, and a display cabinet and film in the Archive Library entrance. The film installation But we didn't see anything... (2015) was central to the show — a work about absence, fading traces and the stories we carry without being able to prove them. Animated archive images and hand draw lace curtains drawn directly onto the windows also accompanied the main exhibition.
Funded by Arts Council England.
Haunted: An Unexpected Revelation (2015) Research contributed to the archives, Nottingham Archives Library.
