Archive Blues

Archive Blues was a body of work created during a residency responding to Leeds Art Gallery's collection of John Sell Cotman and Sydney Kitson. Fascinated by the relationship between the original objects and the tools used to care for them, I sought to reveal and make visible the hidden workings of both an archive and a collection.

I chose to work in watercolour after Cotman – famous for it, and blue after Kitson, who bound his notebooks blue as homage to Cotman. Kitson’s notebooks are particularly poignant; they trace his unfailing dedication to the study of Cotman (his last volume, bound in red, was left incomplete by his death). Drawings such Spines I & II and Covers record the form of Kitson’s notebooks, directing our gaze not to their contents but to their character. Greta Woods is regarded as one of Cotman’s most important works. The back of the frame was covered with labels that reveal the work’s rich history of exhibitions, owners and auction sales. My Exhibition History, makes this usually-hidden side visible. I consider this body of work a visual eulogy to the archival process itself, its instruments and also its melancholy. Along these drawings, I created two animations of Cotman’s sketches that were inconspicuously place among his originals to surprise the viewer by bringing the drawing to life.