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.