Safe Keeping (2010)

Safe Keeping is a Collaboration with Jemima Yong

Safe Keeping is a photographic installation created by Jemima Yong and Peter Reed. The duo have created an immersive installation which is concerned with telling the personal stories of Jemima's subjects - their relationships to her and the world around them. Dozens of identical cardboard boxes contain carefully selected collections of prints which offer clues and fragments of feelings and stories held together by time, place and circumstance. Each box also contains a tape player with a special recording made by the artists/subjects in response to the images in the box.

Audience members can engage with the piece on an explorative level - hunting through the boxes of half-remembered memories; finding their own meanings and stories. There is also space to observe other narratives played out in collages which make vast mosaics of images on the walls around them.

Safe Keeping breaks down the rules of the gallery space and the way in which audiences interact with photographs. It encourages a childlike curiosity and a leap into the imagination through a gesture of generosity and storytelling.

Safe Keeping will have it's UK premiere at The Bowery Gallery, Leeds from 6th January - 2nd April 2011.

 

Archive of Projects

Piano/Paintbrush (2008)

Piano/Paintbrush was a collaboration with Isabel Lyster. The performance was shown as part of an exhibition by London't notorious Da! Collective at a disused £6million Mansion on Upper Grosnevor Street. It was a durational piece which ran for 3 hours in two performers and a white piano occupied a huge whita canvas which covered two walls and a lare portion of the floor. Using music and black paint, the musician and the blindfolded artist set about a tentetive, comic and near impossible conversation using the only mediums available to them.

Thanks to Jemima Yong for documenting the Piano/Paintbrush. This was a one off performance for a special event.

Wrecked (2009)

Wrecked

Wrecked was a collaboration with writer and director, John East. 

‘You understood me and I loved you. Now everything escapes me. Our earthly hopes and desires are only vain fancies, our successes mirages that we try to grasp. If there is one thing certain in this world, it is our pains. Suffering is real, pleasure only imaginary.’ Théodore Géricault, 1817

Set against the political instability of Nineteenth Century Paris, Wrecked tells the tumultuous true story of the artist Théodore Géricault. His paintings and surviving historical documents create the visual and dramatic world in which a doomed love affair takes him from brink of madness to creation of his greatest painting, The Raft of the Medusa.

Verbal Declarations of love flow into passages of dance-theatre and as the artist chases fame and recognition, he edges closer to drowning aboard his own shipwreck.

 Photo: Jemima Yong

Wrecked was commissioned by LCCT and supported by the egg, Theatre Royal Bath. The piece premiered at Leeds Emerge Festival before touring to Theatre Royal Bath and Wilton's Music Hall, London.

The Grandad Orphanage (2008)

The Grandad Orphanage

Grandad is on his death bed and is passing slowly. His family sit by him. A small boy remembers how the Vikings used to send their loved ones off in burning ships with all their possessions... but they don’t have a longboat. They panic, parcel him up in a hurried bundle and post him to the afterlife. He arrives and finds himself in a strange reverse, living his life backwards and growing young. In a surreal montage of scenes and snapshots he races towards his innocence and origins.
 

The Grandad Orphanage was premiered at The Carriageworks Leeds and toured to The Grove Theatre and Notre Dame Studio Theatre. It was generously Comissioned by Leeds City Council through their LS Cash Panel and LCCT.