About this Event
Join us at the atmospheric venue of St Pancras Old Church for an evening launch of devil sculptures with an artist talk + live music.
Artist Melanie Jackson and Professor Esther Leslie talk about the devils, sculptures originally made for St Michael's flats for St Pancras Housing in the 1930s - connecting "fairytale devils and slum-land parasites, brickworks and data-mining, public sculpture and social housing"
LIVE MUSIC
Folk Angel - Devil duet by WillowveilFolk |
6pm - 7pm TALK
Break for refreshments Film + food
LIVE MUSIC 7.30 - 10pm Music
TALK
The talk "excavates the connections between tinderboxes and clay mines, fairytale devils and slum-land parasites, brickworks and data-mining, public sculpture and social housing. Flesh and flush out the devil’s own (special economic) zone, tracing a crooked passage from the buried voids of extraction to the silicon landscrapers of contemporary technology, where data centres and corporate towers rise as inversions of the mines beneath and behind them. In this New-Old London, the devil is at our back."
St Pancras Old Church
St Pancras Old Church, site of ancient Christian worship under recycled Roman campanile tiles. Here Mary Wollstonecraft was laid to rest and Mary Godwin trysted with Shelley.
Context
Melanie Jackson ArtIst RCA was commissioned to create Gilbert Bayes missing ceramic Devil finials, originally 1930s sculpture commissioned for social St Pancras Housing and research into Gilbert Bayes methodology will be explored in the lecture.
The sculpture will join the proceedings.
Professor Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London and Director of A Space for Us People's Museum
A Space for us People’s Museum - Somers Town
A Space for us People’s Museum preserves local voice and a working class area; celebrates its incredible ‘radical, reformers and rebels‘ histories, recording change, as well as to preserve & restitute local working class heritage, including raising funds to buy back four Bayes original artworks, and creating the area's first heritage trail based on Bayes lost finials.
All funds raised to continue the work of A Space For Us.
Ticket sales on donations help us survive, preserve and continue to restitute working class heritage.
More here: www.aspaceforus.club
Instagram: aspaceforusnow
Agenda
🕑: 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
TALK - a performative lecture
Host: Melanie Jackson
Info: Melanie Jackson ArtIst RCA
Melanie was commissioned to create the devil sculptures and research into Gilbert Bayes methodology will be explored in the lecture.
Her multidisciplinary practice involves modes of non-fiction storytelling – through space/objects/text/moving image and sound, working with Dr Esther Leslie.
Solo exhibitions and group exhibitions include DRF Biennale Osaka, Japan); Karlsruhe, Germany; Chicago, USA, Australia, Dublin, Ireland; Brussels, Belgium and Shanghai.
She has work in the Tate and Government Art Collections, and in Private Collections. Professor Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London
Director of A Space for Us People’s Museum
Artist, reviewer of exhibitions, and author of books on topics as diverse as animation, milk, liquid crystals and screen devices, her work encompasses exhibitions such as at MIMA in Middlesbrough, and a Walter Benjamin expert, contributor to In Our Time, a BBC Radio 4.
Event venue & nearby stays
St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, London, United Kingdom
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