This exhibition of embroideries was at the Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth.
All Images Copyright of the artist. Location images courtesy of Peninsula Arts, Plymouth.
Colonisation: Variola vera
Colonisation: Variola vera considers the contemporary sublime in relation to The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782 in North America.
Particularly, it utilises the famous story of blankets, infected with the smallpox virus from the smallpox hospital in Fort Pitt, being deliberately given to Native American tribes by local militia members of the British Army, during the time of Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763.
Amidst widespread accusations of biological warfare against General Amherst, General Gage, Colonel Bouquet and Captian Eucyer, the reality of which is richly chronicled and debated by historians, the incident is part of a much larger and very interesting story.
The transmission of the smallpox virus, across North America and Canada during the late eighteenth century, was horrific in its effect and pivotal in the course of North American history. As Elizabeth A. Fenn, Ass. Professor of History at University of Colorado, wrote 'By the time the pestilence was over, it had reshaped human destinies across the continent'. (Fenn 2002)
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This is an ongoing and evolving body of work, comprising a range of hand embroidered woollen blankets. The largest two blankets are wall hung Hudson Bay Point Blankets. Somewhat reminiscent of work by Rothko and Newman as fields of colour, these bright blankets are designed to explore the sublime (as delineated by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into The Origins of Our Ideas of The Sublime and The Beautiful, 1756), but through the medium of contemporary textiles. As the audience contemplate and reflect upon the embroidered smallpox virus representations, stitched and hidden amongst the fibres, a sense of slight terror and awe at the subject, and its deadly consequences, arises.
