Over the coming weeks I’ll be publishing updates around a series of community engagements I’m undertaking in the lead up to the exhibition of those outcomes and the core research from the past 5 years. The blog with reflect on the engagement process and the journey to that point, and ultimately the exhibiting process.

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In 2014, I purchased a collection of early 1900s glass negatives on Ebay. They had no provenance but my curiosity developed into a forensic research of this lost family archive.

Through a few clues offered up in the images and the original boxes they came in, I have been able to piece together a substantial family history around the images. The original photographer, Simeon J Gearing was not a professional photographer but was a manager for the Mersey-based tug boat company Rhos, and lived in Wallasey. It is also clear that at a point within the collection, post-WWI his son Sydney J Gearing inherited the camera and he continued to use it right through until the 1950s.

Simeon was born in London, worked in the East Ham docks as a lightnage operative (barge-man), married a girl from Wortwell, Norfolk, and moved to the Wirral to be a manager at a shipping company. Sydney was born in London but grew up on the Wirral.

I was also born in London, moved to the North-West and my father is a Norfolk boy, I spent many of my early childhood summer holidays on the family farm in Bradwell, near Great Yarmouth. Acquiring this collection appears to have been pre-destined, the parallels are uncanny.

My artistic practice is based around ‘place’ – a sense of place. Often exploring fragments and hints of relationships with a location, I am interested in evidence of human interaction with the geography of a place and the re-imagining of those landscapes, both urban and rural.

The collection reveals some extraordinary stories, coincidences and connections, some with my own family life. Through a forensic research process and an almost voyeuristic obsession with this collection, I am currently completing new photographic work in response to the locations and subjects in the collection. I’m fascinated by the moment these pictures were taken. However I’m intrigued by the odd, and easily overlooked elements and repeating motifs of the collection. Why for instance when I visit the back garden where Simeon is pictured with his dog ‘Prince’, do I find the current owner with her dog ‘Princess’. My photography explores the forgotten and lost, the ordinary and extraordinary, the figures on the periphery, the distant voices and still lives of both Gearings’ geography and extended family.

Using the 95-year-old camera that documented the family archive of glass negatives, I will expand my practice, collaborating with 7 specifically identified Birkenhead groups that are touched by the content of the archive. This will include: a care home formerly an Edwardian photographic studio; the Kirby Rifle Club; Liverpool Pilot Boat Association; and Williamson volunteers.

Reawakening the camera’s use, with the assistance of a heritage photography specialist, I will complete a socially-engaged reflection on the extraordinary stories, people and places the archive reveals. Exploring these themes will empower the community groups and I to investigate our own collective cultural heritage, making insightful connections and responses to the archive.

Through this engagement, the lost stories will be reanimated within contemporary artistic practice and the outcomes of the engagement, the archive, and the groups’ input into my work, will be exhibited at the Williamson Art Gallery where Sydney visited. The reimagined narratives and constructs will inhabit, disrupt and blur the boundaries of the Museum’s visual arts spaces and permanent collections.

I will also articulate what the project has meant to me, working with writer George Szirtes (a 8,000+/- word short story) and through an exploratory Q&A with archivist, David Govier.

I have been successful in applying for an Arts Council England Project Grant to complete the engagement and deliver the exhibition. The Elephant Trust have also assisted with funding a specific aspect of the engagement.

 


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