Displacement: Gainsborough Works

a collaboration between Dawn Jutton & Eliza Bennett

Displacement, a site-specific installation, responds intuitively to the surrounding space, working with sculpture, photography, industrial refuse and discarded objects, repurposing the gathered materials, to compose a loosely choreographed site that explores the psychologically charged artefacts, evoking both loss and transformation, resulting in a meditation on displacement & belonging.

Evolving from our shared sympathy for the factory we came to occupy in its semi-abandoned state, this collaboration was sited in an old shoe factory and is a sort of geometry of echoes. Imbued with the passage of time the remnants we uncovered here have become talismans and relics of its story. The ghosts of the past seem rhythmically animated by the many feet that now come to dance upon the joists that once housed the machines and orderly rhythmic feet of productive workers.

from ‘Displacement’, Gainsborough Works, 2016
 Enter
 The long factory room, lengthening with each step, as it disappears in the darkness.
 The shadows of the day pass, across the room on the opposite wall. 
 Smudging fleeting marks, of lights caress upon the perceived inert totems.
 There’s a faint scent of something otherworldly, lingering…
 Fast diminishing with the odor of fresh paint and plaster.
 Falling light pools in black robes of fabric across the floor,
 Escorting the dead with its ghostly renderings
 Leaning against the invisible,
 Evening light arranges itself around the fallen leaves 
 And shadows lie at the feet of everything.
 
by Eliza Bennett

Beyond the Surface

‘Beyond the Surface’ are two pieces created for the ‘Scapes exhibition at Guildhall Gallery, Stafford.

I re-visited Marston Road in the north end of Stafford, an area near to where I lived for many years, and where I have ben recording the changing architecture for three decades. The two pieces are constructed from found boxes and contain composite images inspired by the collected the memories of people I interviewed in the street and my own children’s memories. In ‘Beyond the Surface; No.1’

Whilst the found boxes relate on a personal level to a family history of regular unpacking and packing of boxes of belongings and childhood slideshows of our travels, the images explore different personal experiences and memories of a particular area at various times, encouraging a re-examining  of environment and personal relationships to space.

from ‘Beyond the Surface; No.1’
‘Beyond the Surface’ No.2