Ensemble Artworks Catalogue

Threadbound by Cash Aspeek & Collective Agency, 2024

Cash Aspeek: 

The object is a white figure in the human form, about the length  of a forearm and hand. It is completely bound in white fabric as if cocooned, concealing all its features.  

It could be propped up on its toes, on a shelf at about head height, or it could, more comfortably, lay in your hands. 

It is soft to touch, more so in some parts where the fabric is  thicker. In other areas like the upper chest, and face, it is firmer, making it clear that the fabric is covering a more solid body, although it is light in weight, about 9oz. 

The figure is well proportioned, wrapped quite haphazardly, bandage like creating horizontal lines as it rises up the  individual legs, then goes a little diagonal over the hips and  straightens again across the flat chest, up and over the head and down each arm, mummifying it completely, with some raw edges escaping. 

It is heavily stitched.  

Some of the stitching is required to hold the cloth together so they follow the horizontal lines of wrapping.  

Other stitching creates patterns  

Ordered  

squares and rectangles,  

Disordered  

lines and waves, 

All in  

red,  

dull gold,  

or black. 

There are areas of  

running stitch, 

in and out stitch, 

over stitch,  

diagonal stitch, 

crossing stitch,  

they could resemble splinters or scars,  

pinched and raised, 

over and over,  

under and under, 

There are long threads from neck to shoulder, on the left. And even longer threads from top of head to shoulder, on the  right. 

These connecting threads incarcerate the body.  

The arms are stitched to the body with inch long threads front and back, from pits to finger tips.  

One arm is slightly longer than the other, which gives it a kind of unbalanced look. 

The figure is quite rigid, apart from the legs, which have a bit of flexibility where the knees would be.  

One leg is slightly fatter than the other as they descend from its full bottom. They too are stitched together from thighs to the heels, furthermore confining. 

The fabric is loose weave, thin, almost transparent, with a  stretchy quality. 

It is not pristine, a dingy white, stained and grubby, as if it has had a previous purpose. It smells a little musky, like it’s had a  past, even before it was made, decades ago. 

The solid structure of the figure was originally made as a  teaching demonstration. This was one of many such teaching aids over the years, but on this one occasion I took the piece  home and continued its development into being. I then wrapped it up, and put it in a cupboard in my bedroom. It is only now that I realise its significance and title it, Threadbound.

Collective Agency:

Pick it up, we were told. Go ahead and touch it. Handle it.

But for now we decided just to look.

It was a human figure, we saw, lying on its back. Something like an embroidered doll or a poppet, made to be held or cradled. A collection of soft white shapes patterned all over with thick, crimson threads.

The figure lay prone, arms bound to its sides by red thread, legs gently extended and stitched together too, feet pointing up. 

Its head was a round shape wrapped in white, cotton-looking fabric. Large and undefined, we thought, like the head of an infant. The same white fabric wrapped the rest of the figure too, we saw, swaddling its sweet-potato body and long, full-grown limbs. There were hips, we thought, but no shape of breasts, and its hands, held a little out from its sides, were as if the figure was wearing soft, white mittens.

And it really was so inviting to the touch, this figure. The gentle bulges of its form, the layers of white cotton, sheer or bandage-like, neatly puckering at pleated seams, and that thick brocade of red thread, which seemed to begin on the crown of its head and proceeded in concentric circles of tactile, crimson stitches. They rounded the crown, as if describing it, and then ran off the head and into space, stretching down to reattach at the shoulders, stringing the air like a harp. 

More red stitching ran in lines down the undulations of the figure’s body or traced like a finger horizontally, defining the chest and girding the legs, softly binding the form crossways, arms to sides, legs together. There were even gentler red traces, too. Tiny crimson stitches on the figure’s left flank, like herringbone or chevrons, and a rash of crosses at its waist. 

There was only one slight deviation that we discerned: one leg had a dark green or black thread accent which ran from just above the pubic area down towards where its knee would be, many small, scratchy stitches, horizontal, like a ladder.

And then we went to pick it up. To our surprise it was hard and almost completely rigid, as if it was resisting being held. There was no give to the figure’s bulbous shape, and its limbs were static and more tightly bound than we had thought.

But we were most surprised when we turned the figure over. The embroidery there was dark green or black, and the thick threads were concentrated in a hard square stitched where the figure’s backside would be. A little further down, we saw the legs were tightly sewn together, as if the figure was trapped inside a sleeping bag.

We put the doll down, quickly, and did not pick it up again. It wasn’t fun to hold. It didn’t seem right, somehow.

The strange thing was how, now that it was just lying there, comfortably prone, the figure had regained its naïvety. We thought that if we picked it up again, we would find it had transformed into something soft and malleable, the boxy secret on its back forgotten, the body touched against itself, hanging loosely, naturally, as if, even without the threads that bound it, the figure would choose to lie in this position anyway.

And the more time we spent with it, the more comfortable the figure appeared to be. Immobile, but present, its thick, red threads alive and tactile.

Spring Painter by Louise Ashcroft & Collective Agency, 2024

Louise Ashcroft:

We are looking at a slightly grainy, colour video projection which is the size of the gallery wall, so we may feel like we are present in the landscape it depicts.

The first scene shows a woman kneeling down on a grassy hill, with woodland in the background. The grass around the figure is tufty and unkempt, with rocks and straggly bramble stalks dotted around in clumps. The weather is overcast in a British way, and the deciduous trees are bare; they do not yet have their Spring leaves, but the birds are singing fervently as if to beckon new shoots.

The footage is DIY, low-fi, digital - perhaps filmed on a cheap camcorder or outdated phone.

We are several metres from the woman, who occupies the centre of the screen. She has shoulder length brown hair. She is white, in her twenties, and wears basic boot-leg jeans, black trainers and a black hiking jacket - the kind of outfit you might wear for a walk in the forest.

She is not walking, though, she is kneeling, and taking in the landscape a different way. She soaks her denim-clad shins in the dew-damp grass, holding a paintbrush in her right hand.

There’s a white, plastic palette next to her, filled with luminous green and yellow paint. She dips her brush into the palette, mixes it about a bit, then hunches over a stalk of foliage and appears to paint it… Not painting a picture of it, but painting directly onto the stalks and leaves, turning them a vibrant, unnatural green hue.

Her painting ritual is pragmatic: a meditative, repetitive, private act carried out with utmost care and sensitivity. Does she lack awareness of how violent her actions are as she daubs the luminescent petrochemical paint; smothering the living tissue of these wild plants which will certainly be killed by it before they have a chance to bud?

Is the camera on a tripod? No, it moves closer and it shakes a little - someone else is filming. Their presence means it doesn’t feel so private anymore.

The painter appears calm, as though this duty is no burden and she has got all the time in the world. She is too engrossed to pay attention to the camera, but she must know she is being recorded. We may wonder who is filming and why they might want to capture this clandestine gesture of trespass, vandalism and destruction.

Additional camera shots follow, showing the same process in different scenes around the forest and grassland. There are close ups, honing in on the detail of the shades of green paint as she blends it, smears it, and drips it over twigs and weeds. There are camera shots from further away too, where we see her standing up, amongst the trees, reaching to stroke some spindly branches with her lurid gunge.

In some shots the painter has her hair tied back, suggesting the film is a collection of clips from multiple visits to the forest. The sunlight changes from scene to scene, showing a lengthy duration of time passing - from cheerless and shivery, to golden hour glow, as we follow her path through this wild place.

How wild is it, though?

Towards the end of the video, red-bricked terraced housing is glimpsed in the background for just a split second which is enough to de-romanticise the rural idyll we’d been led into. Suburban banality bursts any mythos of Greco-Roman Goddesses (Flora and Chloris) whimsically beckoning in the season of new life.

Our deadpan painter is just doing her day-job, without ceremony. She doesn’t paint over the whole place; is she being half-hearted or precise? - sprucing-up only snippets of the sprawling vegetation… points of day-glow intensity, like some forest manager can-spraying neon spots on ash trees doomed to be felled.

The painter’s sporadic flecks of artificial greens jump out from the faded, desaturated landscape of the projection, as though she is tempting photosynthesis - trying to speed it along. She is touching up the colours of the sleeping winter scene, forcing it into a jaunty, oversaturated parody of the chlorophyll yet to come.

But Spring doesn’t come…

the video loops eternally.

Collective Agency:

A long, slow view of a wintery patch of grass, somewhere suburban. She was crouched in a squat and leaning towards a low, wide plant with oval leaves. In one hand she held a paintbrush, and beside her on the grass we saw a white, plastic artist’s palette in the shape of an open flower, and on each of the palette’s petals green pools of paint had been mixed.

It was a vivid green. Lush green. Green green. More than green, almost unreal compared to the pale scrub and the wintery leaves of the plant in front of the painter.

She dipped her paintbrush into the palette and took some green and leaning forward she applied it to one of the plant’s oval leaves. Then she took some more green, and some more, addressing the leaf’s surface with the brush until it was completely covered, completely green, greener than the dull shade it had been before.

Then with a free hand, her face impassive, she lifted the tip of the painted leaf to reveal its pale underside. Lifting it not gently but with a professional kind of care, and she applied the paint there too.

She didn’t seem like a vandal, or an actor in a sketch. And she wasn’t dressed like an artiste. Just blue jeans and a black jumper. She had long, straight, blond-brown hair, messily tied back and strands of it were blowing across her face. Her expression was impassive and workmanlike. Her movements methodical.

But it wasn’t about her. It was about the paint. The green paint. Bright green. Green green. Now it was being painted onto brownish leaves in a scrubby bit of parkland, and now it was coating the wintery stems of bushes somewhere more urban, a grey metal fence in the background. And now green was being painted onto a weed in the middle of a washed-out patch of grass, and now to a group of gangly saplings, their brown, mottled trunks transformed under her brush, enveloped in the green, green paint.

And the painter didn’t own the places she was painting green. She wasn’t in her garden. They were public spaces, and we imagined a kid coming past and shouting: “Is she painting the plants? Oi! Is she painting branches?” And a cantankerous elder on his way back from the corner shop, blue bag in hand, shaking his stick at her: “You can’t do that! It’s toxic! You’ll kill them!”

And the painter would continue, we imagined, her face impassive, as if she had simply been employed to do a job, and she meant to do it well, standing with her palette in one hand and her brush in the other, bending towards the plants as she transferred green paint from her palette to the foliage and back again, flecks of it settling on the back of her painting hand, dried patches of green on her pale wrists.

Because her painting was not skilful, exactly, but practised and methodical. She looked as if she might do this every day, at times kneeling down, back straight with both knees on the ground, painting the leaves and stems. She took hold of the dead red buds of a bush and coated them thickly in green, green, green, everywhere in this last of winter landscape, this pre-spring, the sky flat and greyish blue.

And over the top of the visuals, a soundtrack of birdsong and wind noise and a distant car. Springlike and suburban, but not, we suspected, part of the original footage or native to the locations being filmed.

There were things being imposed here. Artificial layerings. And it was absurd, we thought. So silly, to paint the plants green.

We were reminded of ourselves as young children, how we painted walls, or sprayed paint onto grass or rocks and sometimes insects. Treating the world like our canvas. Painting it to our taste, our kind of green.

And this painter here, mixing in her palette what looked now to be a streaky, sickly green, coating the leaves, the branches, the stems, the bark. Green. Green. Green. A uniform green. And painting so calmly, so methodically. Getting the job done

Terence Birch: 

Parker parked upon the plinth poor,

He lost his legs when under the saw,

His stumps stank of surgical gauze,

Until those sores were put on pause.

Created in 2004, the title of this 19 by 8cm sculpture is Parker and it is made from a combination of two different objects. These are a talking action figure, and the inner parts of a fountain pen, namely a gold nib and blue ink cartridge. The fountain pen has been inserted into the groin of the action figure with its nib poking down through a tear in its blue cotton jumpsuit, to which the darker blue ink has stained its crotch up to the waist. Both its legs are removed at the thigh and its trouser leg’s loose fabric is knotted up around the base of its residual limbs. It is positioned with its legs and nib standing upright like a tripod, and with its arms pushed slightly back. It also has the faint traces of a pink gel pen ink that's been applied like makeup over its plastic lips and eyelids. Originally, this sculpture was displayed on a white suitcase-sized plinth that leant at an angle against the wall, but this has been lost over time.

The title of the work is a play on words. It takes its name from the luxury pen company Parker, as well as the fictional character Parker, who plays the role of butler in the 1960s TV series Thunderbirds. This show revolves around the Tracy family and their use of technology to save those in danger. However, the action figure we’re presented with isn’t actually Parker, but Scott Tracy, who is the lead pilot in performing their ‘International Rescues’. Scott is a white British man with black hair and blue eyes. He’s an idealised hero, with chiselled jawline, dimpled cheeks, and open hands ready for action. His role in Thunderbirds is definitely not to serve tea.

So, what we are presented with is a misnomer, Parker is not Tracy, and their roles and expectations in life are different. And I had either made a mistake while buying this action figure on eBay. Or maybe the seller had listed an inaccurate product description. Times were different back on the internet in 2004. But my experience as a disabled person had made me relate to these mistakes. And as I wondered at Scott with his perfect features, I thought to myself, was I even a real man? I’d felt misrepresented by many examples of these heroic models growing up and it led to internalising a lot of negative attitudes towards disability and gender. A lot of mockery and acting false. And so, that’s how this leaking tip of a Parker pen, itself a marker of class difference, could come to stand in for another’s reality. And how this crude intrusion to the groin could, going forward, even become an exaggerated way of speaking back to those inequalities.

But while talking of rescue, I had to travel to collect this sculpture in order to first describe it. The destination was my parents’ spare bedroom in rural Ireland. And after catching a cheap Ryanair flight, I found it in a small wooden box with white furry mould growing inside the corners. This was anxiety provoking to my contamination fears and I suddenly thought to myself ‘how do you describe something when you don’t dare touch it’. I then moved it to a room with more light, and began to note the details of its torso from a distance: on your back, you had a battery compartment, but this was damaged from the tip of the ink cartridge having been drilled up into your conductor plate and forced a lack of connection. And on your chest, you had a series of holes for your speaker, and beneath this, a rectangular button for us to press and hear your voice. Had you been treated better, who knows what words you might have said.

On the night plane home, I reflected on a scene in the movie Forrest Gump where Forrest rescues his friend Lieutenant Dan from the war field after his legs had been blown off in combat. Lieutenant Dan had complained that he was meant to die honourably in battle and how Forrest had now ruined this for him. I thought about how I was rescuing myself too, from perfectionism and relationships being out of balance, and together with my own little soldier who was sealed in a food bag under the seat. Then the lights went out on the plane. Replaced by the guiding lights on the runway, it was a peaceful green amid the darkness.

Collective Agency:

He was, or he had been once, a Thunderbirds doll. Despite everything else, he was still recognisably this. 

A figurine clad in a sky blue jumpsuit, a matching flight cap perched on his light brown hair, his peach-coloured face moulded in hard plastic. He had a masculine face, we thought. A strong jaw and cleft chin, prominent eyebrows and blue plastic eyes, the left with two bright dots, one in the iris and one in the black of the pupil. 

But there were dark shadows beneath his eyes, we noticed, and was that stubble on his cheek? Stubble or grime, we couldn’t say, but it was clear that he was not a new doll. His jumpsuit was faded here and there and stained yellowy-green. He was grubby, as if he had been played with and then left in a box, brought out again months later, wiped down a little, played with, and then?

Both his legs had been sliced off at mid-thigh and his trousers knotted tightly on the stumps. The metal nib of a fountain pen had been thrust through the groin of his jumpsuit from the inside, and a dark ink stain spread in a blot from his groin all the way up to his waist, its epicentre at the frayed hole where the pen nib protruded. 

We found him balancing on these three limbs, the pen nib exploding from his groin towards us, its tip bent upwards on the table surface like a tiny foot for him to rest on.

And despite these modifications and the delicacy of this pose, he leant towards us with all the confidence of a superhero, we thought, his arms held straight and a little out from his body, as if he were flying above a city, shoulders back and head thrust forward, aerodynamic, poised.

The violence of the modifications disturbed us. The force required to drill into the doll’s plastic groin, to thrust the nib through the jumpsuit fabric, to bend the nib tip, to press the hot knife through the thighs, and to pull down on the jumpsuit trousers firmly, knotting the ends tight like tourniquets.

If our parents had found this doll, what would they have thought? We had all used dolls to explore with when we were young. Undressing them. Inspecting them. Pressing them together. But this?

Or was it just a joke? What a silly Thunderbird, we thought, with his stern, all-American face gazing confidently past us, his aviator’s torso balanced so precisely on his pen-nib penis, and that dark patch splashed across his groin.

And yet it was difficult to laugh at him. He did not know he was ridiculous. He had never been shown a mirror. This old thing, this flasher doll, baring himself so sincerely in our direction. It was as if he had not been played with in so long that he had forgotten what was appropriate. 

Gently we reached out to rescue him. He was lighter than we expected, but there was no sense of delicacy to him. He felt sturdy in our hands, in fact, as robust and resolute as the bald expression he wore on his face, or the cold, hard nib inking our fingers.

Fran Cottell: 

In 2004 I made two proposals for ‘arttextiles 3’ - a Bury St Edmunds Gallery touring show. The first one, Perception was realised; the second one, Construction, wasn’t... possibly because Perception (I am quoting from one of the selectors: Susan Hiller’s comments in the catalogue here) drew ‘attention to the clothing’ and ’the fibre of the clothes being worn by a member of staff in each of the galleries’. Which she considered at the time was ‘a completely new element, certainly within art textiles’... And like Construction the ubiquitous, unappreciated utility and everydayness of cotton was already the subject of other work chosen for the exhibition. I have taken this opportunity to retrospectively… (20 years later)... realise this work. 

I have made installations that are site/context and audience specific; today I would say that they are related to a specific situation… The idea of a touring exhibition presents challenges to this idea… in that the number of elements common to all venues is always limited. However the invigilator looking after the exhibition and the usually white walls of the gallery itself are generally constant. In this case the white walls of the gallery become interchangeable with the spatial field of hanging cotton sheets. Alternative titles to Construction were considered, for example COTTON / WHITE COAT combining the first and second spaces we inhabit: the clothing and the room. 

The work:  Construction consists of the word COTTON written in capital letters in a straight line on the wall, left to right... To the right of the word on the floor is a large heavy 5 litre full can of paint, with a roller and a paint tray, sitting on a neatly folded up blue tarpaulin. 

The distance between the bottom of the letters to the floor is approximately a metre. The letters are the height of a short adult... so as we look up… the top of the letters are reaching up to the height of a door. If we were to walk along the length of the work it is roughly nine steps.  

The letters are outlined - not filled in. The font is plain and simple with no embellishment. Eye height for me (I am 1.6 metres)... is a third the way up each letter. If we stand in the middle of the work the tops of the two Ts nearly meet almost forming an arch… framed on each side by the two empty Os… like vast portholes or round windows. If we touched the letters we would feel the vinyl matt, which is very slightly raised on the white wall. 

The first three letters are formed from black outlines: COT. The second T is split vertically: the outline of the left half is black, the right half dark grey. The dark grey is also used for the last two letters: ON. This change of colour makes the work feel more active, as if it is still in progress/unfinished and it gives a reason for the paint cans to be present in the gallery. 

The 5L paint tin on the floor has two identical labels stuck onto its sides one on the back and one on the front. On these labels are the text that say COTTON in white block capitals in the same font. There are no outlines. The letters are formed from white negative cut-outs across a close up of coloured picture - in green and white with bluish shadows - of a cotton field. The centre of focus is around the word - moving slightly out of focus in the foreground and distance. The tin sits on the folded blue tarpaulin with a fresh roller and a clean, unused paint tray.

In the original proposal the letters were all black… i.e. the COTTON painting of the gallery is finished. The work then relied on the curiosity of the visitor to make further enquiries about the meaning and then be shown the COTTON paint cans in the gallery store or workshop... so these could have been easily missed.   

I am describing this work as it is on the wall directly in front of me and you. As it was intended for a touring show to a number of different spaces - the siting and size of the letters could change in response to each space.   

In a different gallery space I might move the letters up to the top of the wall so the top half of the letters are on the ceiling. 

Having re-considered this work 20 years from the original proposal I find cotton a very problematic word, loaded with resonances that I didn’t consider at the time.

Collective Agency: 

We saw the black outlines of letters on a white-painted wall. Six of them, as tall as stepladders. They were so large it was hard to read them all as one word.

C

O

T

T

O

N 

To the right of the letters, just near the final N, where the white wall met the floor, we saw a tall, metal cylinder, a tin of paint. There was a paint roller leaning against it, and both roller and paint tin were nested in a black, plastic paint tray, a protective tarp folded neatly beneath them.

Our first question was: had the paint in the tin been used to write the letters on the wall? No. Impossible. The letter outlines were far too thin and precise to have been made with a roller. And besides, the roller looked brand new to us, soft and dry. The paint tin too was pristine, no drips of paint around its lid, and the black tray was clean, and the tarp too neatly folded to have ever been used.

And then we noticed that, over the top of the paint tin’s original branding, a new label had been glued: an image of a cotton field, a colour photograph, with a cotton plant in the foreground, white fluffy bolls clustered on its green stem, and, receding into the distance, more cotton plants. In the middle of the label, erasing the cotton field with white block capitals, in a clean, contemporary font, those same six letters: 

C 

O 

T 

T 

O 

N

No, we thought. Absurd. There was no such thing as cotton paint. We weren’t naïve apprentices, sent to the builders’ merchant to ask for a long stand or tartan gloss.

But if there were, we thought, if there were such a thing as cotton paint, what would it be like? 

Something off-white, perhaps. Something like linen. Something light and soft, worn and bought, packed and washed, stitched and spun, picked and picked, and picked, and picked.

From the image on the paint tin we moved to the text on the wall. The black outlines were made from a shiny, sheeny plastic, we saw. Clear. Contemporary. A strong statement font.

Cotton.

Then we spotted something new. The vinyl letters were not uniformly black. There was a seam running down the middle of the second T, and the right hand half of it was a charcoal grey. 

Click.

And we saw that other things were not as clear cut as we had thought. There were kinks in the vinyl where the letters had been attached to the wall, in the crease of the N and the necks of the Ts.

Cotton. 

And there was something off too about the pristine paint tin, wasn’t there? the brazen, white roller, the dry tray, the perfect tarp. They were like props on a film set, we realised. We were on a stage. 

But where the actors were, we didn’t know, and there was no one in the photograph on the paint tin’s label, either. No sign of the hands that picked the bolls, no sign of the people hauling sacks, no sounds of whip and whirr as the cotton gins worked, or chimneys pumped, or the hangers racked, or the landfills sank.

And there was no help to be found where we were, either. No one around to take control or explain. And certainly no one there to spread the tarp, crack the tin lid, fill the tray, grasp the roller and erase the word.

Colin Lievens: 

Preserved in a clear cuboid are two eye-shaped sections of breasts with pale white skin. 

They have been preserved side-by-side in a transparent box. All six sides are made of thick plastic. Think about Damien Hirst, but with cleavage rather than cows. But not like sexy cleavage, they’re disembodied slices of skin with a backing of thick, greasy, yellow clouds of fat. 

The cuboid’s height is about the size of a fresh pencil, or my hand span. It’s about 50cm wide. I wanted to compare that length to a real-life thing but couldn’t think of anything at all. When googling it all I got was either a newborn baby or a third of Danny DeVito.  

Each piece of the tissue is the width of that same fresh pencil, and they’re pretty flat. Unlike the numerous casts taken before they were removed, they’re an inaccurate memory of the pointy, saggy boobs they once were. They’re also not identical. My surgeon and my collaborator both noticed a difference in their shapes and sizes before they were amputated, but it’s only clear to me now that they’re detached from my body. 

Unlike other, similar specimens, mine still have nipples. The nipples are shrivelled like they’ve been in the bath for too long. And the bath has gotten cold. 

I don’t know about you but I’ve seen four other specimens like this before, two pairs. The first were in jars, floating in some kind of alcoholic fluid. The one on the left had part of this big, aged tattoo of a star around the nipple, or at least where the nipple used to be. 

I used to work in the museum where that pair lived and would wipe down the glass case that the jars were housed in. The part of the case with the breast tissue was always the most smudged with hand and nose prints. So, if you would like, you could imagine mine behind glass too, you can imagine the sensation of pressing your nose up against cold glass. 

In reality, my tissue live in a big box in an archive, surrounded by enough pieces of bubble wrap to pack up all your crockery and move house with. The box is plastic and transparent, one of those very useful boxes with blue clips to hold the lid down. That box brand is pretty standard in most archives and museum collections. On the lid and one of the sides, someone’s written ‘box 7’ in permanent marker. 

The edges of the skin - where they’ve been cut from the body - are curled ever so slightly, like the dried-up skin on some meat that’s a bit past it. There’s also a few tiny incisions throughout the skin where the tissue has been threaded with thin fishing wire and attached to the back of the display case. 

When my mum moved house a few years ago all she could really afford was a fixer-upper in a small village outside Brighton. We visited the flat together and, after years of the previous resident’s smoking, the walls were saturated in yellow nicotine stains. That’s what the back of the tissue looks like, if maybe the house was also a living, lumpy, organism. The texture is almost that of coral, but I imagine it would be greasier to touch. Maybe not though. My only frame of reference is meat, which I suppose this is. But it’s all the bits I’d cut off before serving. 

The second pair I’ve seen were bigger and the skin was far more circular. I guess that’s because the operation was performed by a different surgeon on a very different chest. They’re preserved in a similar way to my tissue. This pair were in two separate transparent blocks though, mine are together in one. Both pairs were preserved by the same scientist. 

The cuboid case which encases both of my pieces of tissue, is heavy. It’s full of some sort of liquid (alcohol? Formaldehyde?). There’s a small air bubble that floats about at the top, giving it the potential to be the most disgusting snow globe you’ve ever seen. 

If you were to hold this object, it would just feel like a hard plastic rectangle, because that’s what it is. It’s heavy, on account of the liquid. There’s no smell either, if you tried to sniff it you would probably smell the rest of the archive you were stood in. You’d smell the vintage fetish magazines or the photographs of past pride parades and protests, with which my tissue shares a home.  

Depending on the angle you look at it from, you can see reflections of the tissue on the opposite side of the box. Like a tiny, horrifying hall of mirrors. 

I would describe for you the vibe of this piece, of my tissue, the emotions it might evoke for you, but honestly I’ve no idea. For me, just thinking about it makes me feel sick. You might feel sick too but probably more of a visceral sickness rather than an emotional one. You’re probably glad that they aren’t right in front of you, that you can’t look upon the severed skin, the thick clouds of fat. Maybe you’re disappointed though, maybe you want to push your nose against the glass and gaze upon them. 

Collective Agency: 

Two breasts. Suspended in a glass box. 

They were positioned as if on a person’s chest, and as if that person were sitting, facing us.

Two breasts. Someone’s breasts. There was something so stark about them. The way they hung behind the glass. Just there. Facing us.

We went to humour first, a defence mechanism. Like eyes, we said. White eyes with pink pupils, and around the edges, yellow lids, the bottoms baggy with sleep. Or they were chicken breasts. Slices of ham. And flowing out behind them, a yellow cloud of bumpy mush, like lumps of sweetcorn, or the disintegrating foam stuffing of a chair.

But the truth was, we were shocked. We hadn’t been prepared for this. For these.

A pair of breasts. So clearly real. So bodily. The fullness of their shape, their white skin, downy and a little puckered, as if cold. And protruding slightly, two rosy nipples. 

But that yellow mush that spread out behind the white skin. That must be what had been inside the breasts, we thought. Or what was inside them, still. What was made visible now they were no longer attached.

A pair of disembodied breasts. 

We needed to narrow our view. To examine them. Yes. That was the word we used. Examine. And closely, please, and as a matter of urgency, in fact, because we couldn’t think of them for much longer as what they had been or perhaps still were, as these sensing, sensuous things, as things which had felt and been felt. Because (how polite we were being) these were sexy things, weren’t they? Objects of desire, and fascination, page three so and so’s. And they were sexed things and gendered things, too. The sites of so much pleasure and pain, life giving and taking, suffering and joy. Right there. These breasts.

No. We needed to think of them as something else. As tissue, for example. Because that was what they were. What it was. Just tissue. Dead tissue. The innards of a body. Any body. Laid out and pumped full of preservative. Encased. Displayed.

Look. 

We stood over the glass box and viewed them from above. They were like icebergs,  their white tips showing above the surface and their bulk billowing beneath.

And moving our faces close to the glass we saw that, hiding amongst the yellow tissue, there were the black lines of veins and vessels, and towards the centre, within the dense yellow mass, there was something red. 

And we saw on both breasts, on either side of the nipples, two hard lines like incisions or where something had gripped, red lines that spoke of clamping and blood, scalpels and incisions. We thought of the conversations before the operation, the busy waiting rooms, antiseptic wipes and the plastic of the examination bench. We thought of the conversations with the surgeons, and the nurses, and needles, swabs and questionnaires, and the first incision and the clatter of scalpels into steel trays, and the lifting, the cleaning and the placing into bags, and the weight of them, and refrigeration and transportation, and the choosing of the box and the cleaning of the glass, and how each one was lifted, the two hands that cradled them, arranged them, attached the wires, filled the box with fluid, adjusted them, made sure that they sat right, as if on a person’s chest, facing us.

Dr Aaron McPeake:

The artwork I have chosen for this unique exhibition is a bronze plate gong I made around eight years ago in the Bandoola Foundry in Mandalay Burma which is owned by the Lwin family. It’s a traditional Burmese gong pattern called a Kyi Zi (spelt K Y I Z I) but it is not circular like most gongs we might imagine.

This very much resonates with me personally as my dear late friend Derek Lawrenson, brought one of these types of gongs back from Burma about 25 years ago and it was the spur for me to make interactive sound sculptures that beholders can touch and ring. I still have the piece at home today, hanging from a shelf full of small Asian wood and bronze sculptures. This work has never been exhibited, nor is it ever likely to be, as it is something that goes beyond being one of my artworks for a number of reasons. It’s probably the best Kyi Zi I’ve ever made from both visual and sonic perspectives - it has a unique balanced quality I’ve not been able to achieve in other iterations. It’s also come to be a memento mori for people I’ve lost in the past twenty years or so; my mother, partner, Derek and my friend’s 21 year old daughter - all of whom I made and gifted similar works to. 

The piece is a flat but slightly concave sheet of bronze about 1cm thick. It is triangular in shape (almost equilateral) and it’s about 12cm from the tip of the triangle to the centre of the base. However the base is wide and curves upwards with extrusions at either end of the base which curve upwards like horns or the ends of skis. These ski-end extrusions mean that the width of the base is wider than the length of the sides. 

The top of the triangle is a very rounded shape and both the sides of the triangle as we go down are mirrored - the edges have a series of patterns or notches that go in and out. When we get about halfway down the sides there is a big curve gracefully sweeping down to meet the upward pointing ski ends at the base of the triangle. 

Although I’ve described it as an equilateral triangle, it very much looks like the silhouette of a fat sitting Buddha with curves and notches indicating that there’s a head at the top and shoulders and body below. 

In the middle near the very top of the triangle there is a small hole about 5mm in diameter and it is from this hole that a string passes through and it’s this string from which the object is suspended. Therefore, it hangs from a point in the ceiling and the object is freely in space about one and a half metres from the ground. 

The surface of the piece is quite golden in colour and it is smooth and shiny, however, on closer inspection one can see fine lines running across horizontally, the whole surface. They are like very straight brush marks and can be felt if one runs a fingernail across them. 

As beholders are free to touch and ring the gong they are first likely to notice its mass, and although it’s rather small (smaller than a paperback book) it feels extremely heavy or dense - about ten times the weight of a paperback. After handling the metal, one can notice a smell on the hands caused by the body oils reacting to the copper and tin alloy. This smell is akin to when one handles copper coins.

In order to sound the gong, a small mahogany mallet is provided. This has a round handle with a rectangular head, much like a camping mallet. The hammer faces are covered with leather so as to soften the strike and the attack on the resulting sound.

The gong sounds very differently depending on how forcefully it is struck and also where on the surface one strikes it.  

If it is struck gently at the centre of one of the faces, the piece rocks in space gently changing its reflectivity and it generates a single tone reminiscent of a tuning fork or the audio tone in the old days of TV closedown. This tone has a very long sustain, some have called it a longtail, something which continues to resonate beyond expectations like birdsong.

The sound feels pure and tender and as the object gently rocks in space, it has a cradle like quality.

When the gong is struck with force on one of the curved horns at the base, a very loud tone emerges. The gong rotates quickly on the string and as it does so its reflective surface flickers, shimmers and flashes as it spins. The sound also throbs or oscillates like an audio lighthouse or pulsar, initially quickly pulsing but then slowing as the entropy of the force takes effect.

In Burmese temples, the Kyi Zi  is sounded to mark when a donation is made but it is also used as an aid to meditation.

When I see and hear this particular novel work, I think of those that have left us and what wishes they would send to me.

Collective Agency: 

A piece of metal hanging on a string, about four feet from the floor. 

It looked like a bell, we thought. But it was not a bell. It was flat. Not squashed or flattened, just flat. A shadow bell suspended in the air.

How big was it? The size of a hand. A drilled hole at the top where the suspension string attached. It caught the light and glinted, and showed its colours: brown, gold and sometimes silver. 

This shape suspended in the air. A bell-not-bell. Or was it some kind of hat perhaps, with a thin, curling brim and domed crown? Or a seated monk, robes pooled about him. A moustache with upturned ends. Or, no, it was a pair of cowboy boots in profile, jaunty toes turned outward and heels flush together.

Whatever it was, the shape had been carefully cut. We saw the marks of steel tools on its dark grained edges. Signs of careful force. The warmth of hands and bronze.

We reached towards it. The edges were rougher than we expected, and running our thumbs along them, we felt the hard bumps like tree bark on the toes of the out-turned boots, around the bell’s thin rim. 

And testing the weight of the string in our hands, it was heavier than we imagined. So solid and dense, this metal form, suspended on a string. So cold, too. 

We thought of ranked brass weights and kitchen scales, heavy ornaments in varnished corners. Just there.

The thing to do now was strike it. Sound it. Yes. We felt it. Compelled to it. So we took up the suedey mallet and we hit it. 

Gently, but the shape seemed to resist being hit. Its weight pressing back against the airy mallet as we raised it again.

Chime.

A single tone. High and clear. Something in the air. A stark mountain. We struck again.

Chime.

And stood in silence as the tone pushed out hard around us, clearing what was there until it was just a silver movement between our ears, then fading. Gently, once more. 

Chime.

This oscillating shape. This dense metal. Suspended in the air. Now a bell. Now a hat. Now a helmet, moustache, chalice. The head of an ancient axe, of course, yes, we saw it, blade downward, pulled blackened from the riverbed.

Chime.

This bell without a tower.

Chime.

The mountain, empty. 

Chime.

Its limpid signal.

Chime.

The not-bell swinging.

Chime.

We held it fast, stopped it mute and gripped. The haptic tone passing through our fingers and down our arms, into our teeth. Electric. Tingling. 

And stepping back, silent, to look once more. 

This silly hat. The boots, ridiculous. Those two men sat back to back in bowler hats, polished toes pointing up. 

What did you see? What did you hear? Did you feel what we felt when you gripped the shape? Was it humming still? A smell on your hands like pennies, no? Brutal. Clean.

Not all of us thought of death. Not at first, anyway. The shape reflected light, we said. It did not drink it in. It did not give us something matte. 

Instead we thought of cymbals, sticks and crashing. Hearing tests and tinnitus. Our loves, their lives. Suspended. Swinging.