".....And Then I Returned It To The Sea".

Glynn Vivian Installation

Sept 2003.

Installation
"…And Then I Returned It To The Sea" evolved as a museum style gallery based environment and has been exhibited at Rotherham Art Centre and The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. The purpose of re-presnting the process through installation was to focus on the idea of how we make history and also to focus on the absent finder. The idea of the spectre in this context takes on a significnace questioning not life after death but the nature of fact and truth in the everyday.

Once installed the work becomes a pristine re-presentation my journey around Britain and set in stone as an event of recordable importance. Through simulating a museum space and then intervening in it with inappropriate material the work closes rank on the representation of history as sealed fact. Placing work that represents a flimsy moment in time intervenes in this process of archiving and making true through museum exhibition which essentially seek to represent the foundations of truth and knowledge. This questioning of spaces was highlighted by the way that the museum environment was installed as a functional looking temporary space that is clearly there for the short term. The museum environment was placed comfortably inside a reading room that simulated the gallery as it would have been in Glynn Vivian’s time. In this space paintings of the sea from the gallery collection were hung salon style.

At the end of the gallery was a reading room again in sort of period style. The reading room invited viewers to cross reference the research- checking the validity of the ghost stories and also to sit at a desk and leave their own stories. By the end of the exhibition visitors had left over 300 ghost stories. These stories were then placed back into the Glynn Vivian archive.

back to "And Then"