Scallop shells. Moss. iPhone and bluetooth speaker. Salt cellar. Plastic trees from a table top war game. Shruti box. Cardoon seed and claw-shaped tongs.
These are some of the many items in Sue Palmer and Sheila Ghelani’s quietly astonishing ‘show and tell’ performance. For an audience of, sat round a table, the pair arrange these objects with precision, pushing them into position with a croupier stick like battleships on a war map, or picking them up gingerly with a litter-grabber. Items of fine antiquity or ecological rarity sit alongside eBay purchases. It is a diorama, a museum collection, or an array of forensic evidence. The objects tell a story of empire, capitalism and nature which starts in the Hampton Court maze and takes in the East India Company, Victorian naturalist Eliza Brightwen, hedgerows and hedge funds.
The performance is measured, warmly held, ceremonious in an approachable way. It took four years to make and you can feel it; it’s meticulously researched, and every detail of its performance is attended to with the utmost care. The invitation to US is to pay attention; to uncomfortable and forgotten histories, to the secret lives of these objects, to the manifestations, colonial and anthropocentric, of the impulse to possess, enclose, exploit and master.
‘What’s this got to do with us sat here?’ sing Sue and Sheila. The answer is, of course, everything. Touring to museums, National Trust sites, libraries, they are at pains to point out the traces of colonial histories plainly visible to us – a portrait hung on the wall, a street name, a ‘collected’ item. The texts and songs – laments sung over shruti box drones – overflow with lists; of dates, of collected bird skins, of Jubilee line stations. The list is a form of text which catalogues and taxonomises, but which expands at the edges and suggests connections between things one might not think natural bedfellows. We must think ecologically; see the world as a system of connections and interdependencies, not only between here and there, but then and now. Reverberations and resonances. Nothing ever goes away, even if forgotten.
Tough Sell Zine, reviewed 09/03/2024 for the April edition
Sue Palmer - artist, maker, producer 