Speaker: Emma Hicks

My name is Emma

Speaker: Katie Louise Williams

and I’m Kate

Speaker: Emma Hicks

and we’ve been working together for

Speaker: Katie Louise Williams

12 years as ek.1.

Speaker: Emma Hicks

With this particular project, the idea for it came from a project that we did in Prague a few years ago in terms of this idea of an untitled, unknown work and try and ascertain its history I guess and the sort of barriers that you come across with that and how to work through those or how to work with those.

Speaker: Katie Louise Williams

So we looked at some of the works from the Town Hall Gallery Collection and found a work done we think in the 1930s. Its title is Unknown, Untitled. We think it was made by women, it’s certainly a very decorative work made with very fine shells and seaweed.

Speaker: Emma Hicks

Huge ornate sort of mahogany and gold decorative frame.

Speaker: Katie Louise Williams

And then there’s a series of wall necklaces which reference the decorative elements of the original work. They’re made from old lobster traps washed up on the beach, bits of old fencing wire, driftwood, old ropes, shipping ropes, anything that’s been collected -

Speaker: Emma Hicks

or discarded.

Speaker: Katie Louise Williams

Anything that’s washed up we’ve been collecting and collecting, and then stockpiling and then sort of matching. It’s very much archived and very much placed within a museum type context. And we’re actually almost performing that work through our walking every day, through our actual living of collecting and doing, so it’s quite a different take. And even the sort of, the shapes that we’re making, the hour glass shapes that we’ll be making out on the floor out of the sand is very much a performative gesture of actually collecting and then living, making the work in the space that will then disappear once the show goes down.