For the Bloc Members Show 2023, Heavy Water present the viewer with a curated ensemble. Created in response to archival materials found in the Portland Collections (Whitaker Museum), the Special Collections at Cardiff University and Sheffield General Cemetery Trust, the themes relate closely to the materiality of the land and humans’ engagement with it culturally, economically, politically, socially and spiritually. Positioned together, the works present the viewer with alternative readings of historical artifacts, while revealing the need to re-categorize, de-colonise, re-imagine, repatriate and re-interpret private and public archives and collections held across the UK.
Bloc Members Show 2023
In An Account of the Voyages (2022), Victoria Lucas works with digital technology to create a rupture in the fabric of illustrations extracted from a 1773 account of the British colonization of the Global South. British depictions of their encounters with indigenous communities are torn apart though the glitch of the scanning process, creating space in-between the pixels for alternative narratives, perspectives, and becomings to emerge.
Joanna Whittle’s work builds upon this potentiality, as her Shear Rock Ceremonial Statuette (2021) becomes a re-imagined artifact imbued with mythological significance. Joanna explores the relationship between ‘creating worlds’ and ‘creating collections’, and the role curation and display of collections plays in developing narratives — real or imagined.
In Sometimes I Never Suffered (2020−23), Maud Haya-Baviera deconstructs the exotic through references to tourism; the promotional images that it generates, how it exemplifies contemporary consumerist desire, and this activity’s role within histories of exploration and exploitation.
