‘It’s sort of long and complicated’, Rebecca Chesney begins, as I take a seat in her central Preston studio. Three years after being invited to take part in a residency at Astley Hall in summer 2019, her works are finally about to be shown. It’s a sunny evening in Preston and Chesney’s studio is bathed in light. As her fingers dance across the soft translucent linen of the curtains she has painstakingly stitched, she explains the process of making that resulted in something so stark and beautiful.
The work from this residency was produced at Artlab Contemporary Print Studio, a research hub for knowledge exchange, experimentation and development housed within the University of Central Lancashire. Led by researchers Tracy Hill and Magda Stawarska-Beavan and supported by a team of research technicians, the Studio is kitted out with specialist equipment and has the ethos of developing printmaking as a fine art, research-based discipline. Here, Chesney was able to explore ideas, working with multiple mark-making techniques until she eventually settled on the first thing she had tried. She negotiated the liquid-like fabric, developing the initial idea in conversation with Hill and working closely with the technical team to experiment with materials and the screen-printing process.
Artlab aims to challenge historical perceptions of printmaking, repositioning it as a key element of contemporary practice. This aim is reflected in Hidden from Light, with Chesney’s new textiles and ceramics a response to the historic Astley Hall, which has stood just outside Preston, in Chorley, for over 400 years. Inside, it retains its grand but delicate staircase and an incredibly intricate mid-seventeenth-century plaster ceiling. The rooms are filled with beautiful oak furniture, a table set for dinner, and pots and pans in the kitchen. It’s an adventure to explore – made even more exciting by the addition of Chesney’s works.
Apotropaic marks
As part of her residency, Chesney was allowed to just ‘be’ in the Hall. Time spent there resulted in her noticing easily passed-by marks on walls, behind beds and on fireplaces. Known as ‘apotropaic’ marks, scratched out with a tool and then burned with a taper candle, they were believed to protect against evil or bad luck in those superstitious times. ‘For a long time, we thought it was an accident’, Chesney says, ‘but then research showed that it was a deliberate attempt to keep evil at bay. They probably spent a bit of time creating them, and perhaps renewed them every year’.
The apotropaic marks and the mystery surrounding them became the central theme of Chesney’s work for Hidden from Light. With permission to take rubbings of the marks, she was able to touch where others once touched, establishing a connection to the past. Once the marks were collected, she considered how to use them. The markings aren’t just patterns, they’re bound up with meanings borne of hope, fear and superstition. Recreating them, in whatever way might be possible, had to honour that history. When Chesney took the rubbings to Artlab, it was a process of trial and error. Creating bed drapes seemed like the perfect happenstance: a cocooned and protective space made even more safe by the marks on the fabric. Whilst Chesney’s printing was playful and explorative, she had to carefully screen print onto delicate white linen, and from there, a pattern seemed to almost naturally repeat.
In the Oak Bedroom, ‘Solace’ is breathtaking. The drapes that hung in Chesney’s studio only weeks ago (as she made the final stitches on the embroidery) now hang around the antique bed. The bed is dark and intricate, and visibly, unmistakably old. Shorter than the average present-day bed, it was designed for lying slightly upright, which people of the time thought would protect them from being whisked away by Death in the night.
Chesney’s bright white, translucent linen provides the perfect contrast: the screen-printed rubbings of apotropaic marks found around the Hall appear wound-like and open, and the red embroidered stitches sit starkly against it. Light comes through the small windows of the oak-panelled bedroom and catches the folds in the fabric, with the shadows of the bed just visible behind it. It’s moving to view it in situ, and my thoughts wander to the curtains that originally hung there and the women who sewed them, and the people that would have once been cocooned inside, on the bed. Because a bed isn’t just a bed; it’s an incredibly personal place of birth, death, comfort and sorrow. What tears were sobbed into pillows here? What giggles were hushed under covers in the middle of the night? What lovers shared moments of togetherness?
For Chesney, a bed was also a place of illness during her treatment for cancer. And in that period of reflection, she found her bed to be a protective space, a cocoon. The drapes that she has created tell part of her story; long and light as they are, there’s also something dark about their rubbings and vivid red stitching. For Chesney, each stitch represents a day she has lived past her cancer diagnosis. The pillboxes on the bedside table are collected from her daily life, on which she stitched and printed marks using a tiny screen and squeegee.
The women of the house
These acts of stitching, mending and creating connect Chesney with previous women of the house. Making and installing work in a historic property is different to installing in a gallery; there are no white walls at Astley Hall, and in a house this old there are many secrets. Hide holes, graffitied names, the rubbed marks on wood panels – all of these speak to lives lived and time passed.
In addition to giving her space and facilities to learn new skills, the residency allowed Chesney to create new narratives for the women who lived here. During her exploration of the house, she discovered two portraits: one of Peter Brooke, master of the house in the late seventeenth century, and the other a woman assumed to be his wife. This intrigued Chesney but after some digging in the Lancashire archives and church records, she couldn’t uncover the identity of the woman or find a record of Peter Brooke’s marriage.
Many women lived at Astley Hall, though only a few lived full lives. Peter Brooke himself had six sisters, though only one, Margaret, lived past the age of four. She was baptised in October 1671, married in 1699, and married again in 1706. Could it be Margaret depicted in the portrait? This discovery, prompted by the unanswerable questions that it threw up, inspired a series of Chesney’s subsequent works.
‘Life’s Cruel Deceit’, a cross stitch, hangs on the wall in the upstairs Side Room, deceptively signed by Eliza Finch, a nine-year-old servant girl.
Same in birth different paths to tread
My hands are worn –
My thoughts never said.
Life’s cruel deceit dealt me with this hand
Yet freedom of mind I demand.
The delicate embroidery on the fabric acts contrasts with the message; inviting the viewer to question the identity of the young girl who wrote it. A girl born into the wrong life, a reminder that in large, imposing houses like Astley Hall, there were other less documented lives being lived. Those of the servants, young and old, were just as valid as the owners but often forgotten. The room is quiet when I visit, apart from a recording of the poem whispered in a chant, as a round. Duplicated and repeated out loud, it feels incredibly personal and moving. Someone overlooked asking to be remembered.
On the top floor, the Long Gallery is one of the most impressive rooms in the house. Lined with oak panels on one side and windows on the other, its two large bay windows contain tiny panels of coloured glass. During the two-year renovation that began in 2020, each panel was removed, painstakingly cleaned and replaced. This is a space designed for promenading, somewhere to walk when the weather was uninviting. Today, its wonky floor and warped floorboards mean that visitors walk through mindfully, conscious of each uneven step.
At the far end of the room and in the second bay window is ‘Remain Here Still’. Small, hand-engraved glass panes sit in wooden frames on the window ledge. Each represents a sister of Margaret and Peter Brooke who died in childhood: Alice, Eleanor, Frances, Mabel and Mary. The piece reminds us of the fragility of childhood in the seventeenth century; like the glass, their lives and health were fragile. In a house that’s no longer a home, it’s easy to forget that the spaces we move through were once somebody’s everyday spaces. The names of the girls that lived here, however briefly, serve as a memorial to their short lives: a reminder that as visitors, we’re occupying their former home.
Thorns
Lying on red silk in the Morning Room is Chesney’s knife – a response to the carving of Judith, killer of Holofernes, on the fireplace in the same room. The resin handle, inset with foraged thorns, glints like a prism. From certain angles the thorn branch is broken in two or three places, but viewed from above it’s perfectly whole.
The motif of thorns can also be found on the ground floor of the house. Foraged during lockdown, Chesney dipped thorns in liquid porcelain, slowly dried and fired them at a high temperature. In this process, the organic matter inside the porcelain burned away, leaving bright white, not-quite-real thorn branches. Dangerous and sharp, they are delicate imprints of nature, placed surreptitiously on a fireplace or side table like a talisman or something more sinister.
This is playful, interesting art that inspires storytelling. Chesney’s work seems both at home in the house and alien to it: a merging of old and new, things that fit and don’t fit together. Whether the innocuous cross stitch of ‘Life’s Cruel Deceit’ or the memorialising of little girls in ‘Remain Here Still’, or the re-creation of Judith’s knife, Chesney has revisited and revealed the stories that lie beneath (or on) the surfaces at Astley Hall.
Chesney’s Hidden from Light is an embedded engagement with the Hall’s materials and histories, a homage to the lives lived and time spent, and a deliberate, playful continuation of its stories. And when, at the end of the exhibition, the works are packed away and taken home, they won’t be forgotten, as they too have become part of this place.
Hidden from Light runs at Astley Hall from 21 May until 20 November, 2022 (entrance ticket required). Rebecca Chesney’s residency at Astley Hall was funded by Arts Council England and Chorley Borough Council. The work the artist produced at Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studios was through subscription to their membership scheme.
Grace Edwards is a writer and ceramicist based in Liverpool.
This exploration is supported by Artlab Contemporary Printmaking Studio.
All images courtesy of the artist.
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Published 12.07.2022 by Lara Eggleton in Reviews
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