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Concordance. Concordance is a series of 6 site specific sculptural interventions that temporarily inhabited the café/foyer areas and textile gallery of the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester for a month prior to the gallery’s closure to complete a transformational fifteen million pound refurbishment on the 1st September 2013. A brochure that I produced in collaboration with Liverpool based design practice Lawn Creative was incorporated within one of the interventions and included an invited essay by Dr Antoinette McKane, Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow, Museum and Heritage Studies, Liverpool Hope University.

Concordance is a series of sculptural interventions that temporarily inhabited various spaces in the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. Occupying the café/foyer area and parts of the textile gallery, the interventions provided an opportunity to extend new strategies of making and conceptual frameworks developing out of my research within a specific museological context.

This new approach involves the creation of a ‘catalogue’ of individual ‘components’ that can be variously configured… and reconfigured. The point of departure for this catalogue of components are the multiple, complex, material and disciplinary conventions from which textile derives its potentially contradictory meanings. However, far from being bound by these conventions, the work aims to maintain a sense of mutability where meaning is produced through temporary connections across the diversity of social, historical and cultural contexts that operate within the gallery environment.

The self-conscious formal staging of the scenarios reference modernist protocols of distance epitomised within the conventions of museological display and the aesthetic artifice of formal autonomy. However, they also draw on the aesthetic staging of everyday mass material objects within interior styling and retail display, where objects and materials that are normally caught up in the messy business of everyday life - or in the case of retail display have yet to enter into circulation - are removed from the business of living and aestheticised through formal arrangement.

I designed an accompanying brochure which included an invited essay by Dr Antoinette McKane, Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Liverpool Hope University.

A direct outcome of the exhibition is an invitation by Dr Jennifer Harris (Deputy Director and Curator of Textiles) to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell ‘Companion to Textile Culture’. Due for publication in 2015, the companion series ‘aims to bring together the very best, freshest scholarship across conventional boundaries of chronology, geography and discipline’.