
Many hands make lightwork (2021)
Fantastical Minecraft night time experience inspired by the lives, loves and fates of Rockingham Castle’s female inhabitants throughout history.
Investigating the life of things across space and time
Installation, textiles, objects, drawing and audio by Sarah Gillett
The flimsy copy appears in the exhibition The Howse Shal be Preserved, Rockingham Castle. Commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, 2020-2021
Fantastical Minecraft night time experience inspired by the lives, loves and fates of Rockingham Castle’s female inhabitants throughout history.
Inspired by the lives of women at Rockingham Castle and their resonance in history, literature and spirituality, this web-based artwork takes the form of a sleeping ghostly female figure and explores an interior world where memory, dreams and shadows reign.
Rewrite of Clara H. Scott’s 1895 hymn, Open my eyes, that I may see , a favourite opening anthem for seances at Rockingham Castle in the 1930s. My version emphasises the house as a haunted body.
For I am Black Lie and I purr rumbling low. I growl hard when you touch me and when you retreat. I walk softly and I am to be followed.
Gaga was the first word out of her mouth but unlike the other firsts in her life she had no memory of it. It was as if it had never happened.
Sometimes she wished she could gaga again, especially when she felt that lump in her throat, fat as a hardboiled egg swallowed by a snake.
“And this is the sign for asleep,” says Alison, closing her index fingers and thumbs together in front of her eyes. “Go to sleep now my darling.”
She smooths out the duvet cover with her hands, uncreasing the printed astronaut suit, flattening the stars in their cotton void, repositioning the blue Earth from sliding off the side of the bed. She kisses Bill’s hair, feeling his fragile skull millimetres away from her lips. “Night night.”
“Night night Mummy,” he says.
Sarah Gillett is an artist and writer from Lancashire, UK.
She currently lives in London.