It’s nice to have a face

Faye Claridge blogs about her artist's residency for Shifting Worlds at Ironbridge Gorge Museum with Meadow Arts

"I was reminded earlier about a conversation I had a few weeks ago about how our Abraham Darbys aren’t the only notables without portraits. Visiting the Canaletto exhibition at Compton Verney before it closed, I was lucky enough to have a behind-the-scenes talk with its curator Stephen Parisienne, who pointed out the self-portrait of Canaletto in the show may not be Canaletto at all. “Still,” he said cheerfully. “It’s good to have a face to start the exhibition with.”

Supposed Self-Portrait of Canaletto © National Trust

Indeed it is and this is the point; we want to see people not just hear about them or see evidence of their work. The face is usually the most important piece of evidence we desire when learning – or making judgments – about a person.

Years of arguments over the reliability of historic portraits aren’t just an academic or financial exercise (although we know a portrait of Shakespeare will be a lot more valuable for sale or visitor-attracting if proved authentic). The issue is more fundamentally about how we relate to other human beings and how we gather ‘evidence’ in making decisions. This is why interrupting the view of a face, introducing a mask, a burka or even face paint, has such an impact.

I’m really looking forward to exploring this more through the handful of silhouette portraits of Darby extended family members on display at Rosehill House (next door to Dale House). Using a combination of backlighting, black face paint and disguise tatter coats, visitors will be able to see me obscure, photograph and further obscure some key people in Coalbrookdale’s current and past stories. I’m open to suggestions on who should be photographed, just see me at Dale House, leave me a note or get in touch via twitter @fayeclaridge.

Faye Claridge by Chris Keenan

Faye Claridge: Industry and the Artist residency, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, June-December 2015

Twitter @fayeclaridge or email info@fayeclaridge.co.uk and on Pinterest

Shifting Worlds: contemporary art and the Birthplace of Industry is a contemporary art programme produced in a partnership between Meadow Arts and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, funded by Arts Council England.

All exhibited work and events take place at Coalbrookdale, the site of three of the ten exciting and varied museums that make up the Ironbridge Gorge Museums. The museums give a fascinating insight into the people, processes and landscape of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the present day.

www.meadowarts.org

www.ironbridge.org.uk

Room with a view

Shifting Worlds artist in residence Faye Claridge continues her blog

"It’s very exciting that I’ve ‘moved in’ to Dale House, setting up to make work and hold meetings in the parlour that was first used for a Quaker meeting in 1717.

Faye (right) working at Dale House, Coalbrookdale

That year was significant, I’ve learnt from the Darby Houses volunteers, both because the property was completed and because its owner, Abraham Darby I, died. The only night he spent in the house was in his coffin. But of course his life’s work and the property continued, even his name continued with his son Abraham Darby II and, later, his grandson Abraham Darby III (who built the world famous Ironbridge).

Yet amid all this continuation, including my contact with their descendant Michael Darby and the Quakers who still meet at Dale House, as I look out the large Georgian windows I’m struck with the amount of change seen by this steep-sided valley. From rural gorge dominated by woodland and river it became a noise and smoke-filled gulley, the aptly named blast furnace operating all day and all night – with people previously brought up for farm labouring now working night shifts for all but the driest weeks of the year.

Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, by Philip James de Loutherbourg, Science Museum Collection

Now in the silence of the museum it’s almost impossible to imagine the impact the furnace had on the community and landscape here. I sit on a window bench and read about the prosperity this bought – wealth, education, housing, opportunity – and fight the notion industry was a destructive monster. Thomas Hardy and other Romantics may not have seen how industry shaped and created as it changed places and people but later critics like William Morris sought to find a compromise, arguing for machines to free people from repressive labour but not to dehumanise, or to take over satisfying labour. Perhaps he was looking to reconcile rather than celebrate the irreversible.

Perhaps, too, this is one of the jobs of the current museums here. They tell a multi-layered story, weaving evidence with context and personality but with little critique. Rather like the glut of Channel 4 exposés into travellers, prisoners, the unemployed etc, an edited description is presented with no transparent opinion. The one opinion that cannot be hidden, however, by their very presence is: This matters. Visitors to Dale House are shocked to hear that the home was nearly demolished in the 1950s, after housing iron works owners and managers for almost 200 years and overlooking the works for even longer. Their shock tells a fascinating tale about where this place and the industrial story sits in our current psyche."

Dale House is one of the Darby Houses, once owned by the Darby Family

Faye Claridge: Industry and the Artist residency, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, June-December 2015

Twitter @fayeclaridge or email info@fayeclaridge.co.uk and on Pinterest

Shifting Worlds: contemporary art and the Birthplace of Industry is a contemporary art programme produced in a partnership between Meadow Arts and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, funded by Arts Council England.

All exhibited work and events take place at Coalbrookdale, the site of three of the ten exciting and varied museums that make up the Ironbridge Gorge Museums. The museums give a fascinating insight into the people, processes and landscape of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the present day.

www.meadowarts.org

www.ironbridge.org.uk

Faye Claridge: Industry and the Artist residency

Shifting Worlds artist in residence Faye Claridge writes about starting the project

"I’ve decided on The Mystery of the Missing Portraits as a subtitle for this project, which uses an intriguing lack of evidence as its starting point. The three generations of innovators and industrialists called Abraham Darby were devout Quakers so didn’t want ‘immodest’ portraits, despite grand portraits being the norm for such influential people in their day.

Proposal image for rag work, Faye Claridge

I’m going to create some alternative portraits, made up of the people in Coalbrookdale and all over the world whose lives altered almost beyond recognition because of the Darby innovations that led to the Industrial Revolution.

These won’t be just any ordinary portraits (these were after all extraordinary people) they will involve facepaint, embroidery and even morris dancing. It’s going to be a fascinating journey, please do follow and join in when you can."

Faye Claridge: Industry and the Artist residency, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, June-December 2015

Twitter @fayeclaridge or email info@fayeclaridge.co.uk and on Pinterest

Shifting Worlds: contemporary art and the Birthplace of Industry is a contemporary art programme produced in a partnership between Meadow Arts and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, funded by Arts Council England.

All exhibited work and events take place at Coalbrookdale, the site of three of the ten exciting and varied museums that make up the Ironbridge Gorge Museums. The museums give a fascinating insight into the people, processes and landscape of the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the present day.

www.meadowarts.org

www.ironbridge.org.uk