VIII There is something redeeming, saving I might even say, in putting our ruins to work. Clare and Alison’s exhibition rearranged the past and set it in motion. It was neither sentimental veneration of the past as past, nor its destruction in the name of the future. They sculpted it. Turned it into montages. Their art is one that preserves fragments of times that are not our own by breaking them and reassembling them in a present saturated in pasts in which we cannot recognise ourselves. The Gallows Point community turned up for the exhibition. Gruff men, not given to words, walked around the exhibition with
their children, and were suddenly turned into narrators of their own stories. Peter Brimecombe, eighty years old, explained to Wilf Levett’s daughter that unique boats were designed at Gallows Point. Her father had designed those boats, though he had never spoken about them. Through the exhibition, the Bad New Things of Beaumaris, who work in gift shops and tourist agencies, were given a different history to the castles and the guided tours that surround them, and it is one that promised the transformation of the material world, and not stagnation. ~
from the top: Traces of the British empire– the finds at Gallows Point include wares from India The paths traced by the detectives at the ‘Fragments of the Past’ exhibition Exploding time, a montage of the old sheds of Gallows Point
56
all images this page: Clare Calder-Marshall
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator