An art group, Space Place Practice, to which I belong, was invited to participate in an exhibition to be put on in the former Thomas soap factory building while it was in transition from being part of a retail business to becoming luxury accommodation. Our contribution to a very extensive show was a book to which those of us inclined contributed responses, of great variety. It was printed and given away during the exhibition (downloadable from the SPP website).
Lately I have been very absorbed by a pamphlet produced in 1884 by two journalists, ‘Homes of the Bristol Poor’. They investigated the poorest parts of Bristol spending time interviewing people in their homes and bringing shamefully to light the abject poverty and and bloodcurdling living conditions of the poor. The soap factory was in a poor part of town, inevitably, due to the awful smells produced by rendering animal remains for tallow.
I have tried to capture the various contrasts of a polluting manufacturing process (smells, smoke and soot), the fresh, wholesome and sentimental advertising of the soap, and the awful conditions of the people through drawings; cows, soap advertisements and the poor, all part of the soap story.
This all takes the form of a concept for an installation in the building which housed the Christopher Thomas soap factory. It is envisaged as projections onto the floor and walls on each storey of the 1865 building, starting at the ground floor, so each image is laid out onto a plan of its floor, from ground to fourth.
This was all got together at very short notice so it was never going to be anything other than a concept, very happy I didn’t have to organise actual huge projections!
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