The title 'Chintz' referenced the particular wallpaper design found in the
drawing room space in Pitshanger Manor Museum.
The installation was set up to respond to this particular site,
using the historical references present within the space to explore both general and personal
ideas of contemporary relations to 'empire'.
Although
initially developed as a site responsive work which focussed on the Victorian history of the
building and associated Victorian 'taste' in Chinoiserie, the work has since toured and mutated,
emphasising a pervasiveness to these cultural appropriations and inhibitions. In its various
permutations (Chintz, From China to Chintz, 'east') the work has strived to keep a narrow
balance between revealing and obscuring information, history and meaning: a balance that
navigates a path between beauty and pain; the atmospheric and the real; the poetic and the
literal. A work that rests on histories of translation, its re-siting has also been a form of
further taxing its readings.
Installation using sound, video
projection, Chintz wallpaper, bird cages, tea chests, tea, lavender essence, Asian bird song,
P.I.R. detectors.
Commissioned by Alana Jelinek and Juliette Brown, Terra Incognita for
Empire & I
First
shown at Empire & I, Pitshanger Manor, Ealing
Broadway, London.
Chintz documentation
