Curtain No.1 Mobilizes textiles to explore how we should engage with archival material when they lack their own archive. The work consists of embroidered organza panels, patched together to form a veil. Curtain No.1 was created specifically for installation as part of Outhouse Gallery’s Boundaries Exhibition, and when illuminated its surface resembles a medieval church’s stained glass window, evoking the pedagogical role that stained glass historically served in conveying a semiotic system of power.

The embroidered imagery initially appear discordant, but all relate the life of Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a man largely forgotten today but instrumental in the formation of Britain’s slave trade, the East India Company and the creation of the Bank of England.

While efforts to interrogate archival knowledge surrounding Britain’s past have gained increasing traction, Heathcote’s legacy remains obscured. My artistic practice engages with the Heathcote’s family in part as a redress to this. Unlike many historical forces, there is little to no material legacy of this family - many of the hitherto overlooked stories of Britain’s past have found articulation through the National Trust grand properties that represent a material legacy. Contrastingly, the Heathcote estate was demolished in the 1920s and later submerged under Empingham Reservoir (Rutland Water). This poses a challenge to decolonial study as a core element of such efforts is intervention within the historic archive in order to break down problematic narratives and better articulate the imperialist underpinnings of Britain’s upper classes.
With the heathcotes, a lack of material legacy leaves their legacy traceable only through fragments. The edifices are already literally deconstructed.

To understand the historical forces entangled with the Heathcotes therefore requires us to stitch together disparate sources, producing a patchwork understanding. This work compliments that process.

Patchwork In Focus - The Portrait versus The Landscape

Sculpture Credit:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edith_weston,_St_Mary%27s_church,_Memorial_to_Sir_Gilbert_Heathcote_(25835505837).jpg

Map Credit:
Part of Tycho Wing’s map of 1726 showing Normanton village and the surrounding fields. (Lincolnshire Archives, 3 ANC 5/104/1) Available at: http://www.rutlandhistory.org/HRW/chapter-011

The face amongst the green lines is sourced from Sir Gilbert Heathcote’s memorial, in which he is described as “A Zealous Friend to the Rights and Libertys of Mankind” and “A Kind Landlord”. The green stitchwork is sourced from Vincent Wing’s DATE Survey of Normanton Village.

Wing’s survey put the spatial boundaries of the Normanton Village into textual form, in turn allowing them to be bought and sold as commodities. Wing’s cadastral mapping enabled the Heathcote family to purchase the entire village and estate, and in turn forcibly remove the inhabitants. Such purchase was enabled through the Heathcote Family’s investment in the enslavement of peoples sent to Barbados.

Wing’s map resulted in the removal of the village he had surveyed. All that remained of the village was the church, which became incorporated as a private chapel for Gilbert Heathcote. Upon his death he was interned in its crypt, with the above memorial placed in the nave. Today, that church is partially submerged under Empingham Reservoir, drowning out the history of the site, its mapping, its ownership, its fraught past.

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