Narratives and Spaces

I had been very excited and positive about the opportunity to involve multiple people’s perspectives in my work with Moyse’s Hall, and the museum carefully collected used coffee tokens. These proved my work had enticed new visitors to the Museum to see my work and the Museum’s other exhibits, and that my work and the Widow’s Coffee House story had been noticed by a new public. While the coffee pot was installed, I saw many visitors reading its label before posing for photos with it. It was impossible to know how many coffee shops actually gave out tokens to visitors, as the collaboration lasted 7 days, and the shops kept no records.

If I had the chance to re-run the collaboration, I would have been braver and used more publicity. With hindsight, the space available for me to use in the Museum was not large enough for the pieces I made, while the space available in the Great Churchyard was much bigger and visible to many visitors. I should have put more work there.

The grassy area available for my work has bodies buried close beneath its surface. I was forbidden to fix anything to the ground. Anything I put there had to be large and heavy enough to stay put! This meant, with constraints of time and resources I had only made one piece for it, but also had an unexpected outcome for the work.

After the coffee pot had been in place for a couple of days, it vanished. I hunted high and low, but could not find it in the Abbey Gardens, so I reported it lost to the police station nearby (the police said they had been admiring it!) The same day it was found, by the Anglia In Bloom judging party, twisted and scuffed, but intact. Because of the few days left for the installation, I mended it fast, and put it back in place. I could not get hold of the special paint I’d used, or dry plaster fast enough, so silver wire had to do.

I also made a hasty video of it.

This episode really enriched these pieces of work. The Coffee Pot was the victim of some modern day rookery! Its site is still perceived in different ways, like the Widow’s Coffee Shop, and the Rookes women themselves. It is one of the town’s best residential addresses and a site of historical importance for the establishment, and the highlight location for the town’s annual entry to Anglia in Bloom (yes, the Abbey Gardens still won its Anglia In Bloom 2014 Gold award!)

But the site is also a thoroughfare. It is where drunken partygoers take a short cut to a major housing estate, and fool around disreputably. It is also a short cut to the town’s magistrates court and police station, used by criminals awaiting sentence, or answering bail, as well as their victims on their way to give evidence.

Like the women who were tarnished by their association with a coffee house, the installation I made to celebrate them was affected by being on the site of the coffee house today. So I feel it did tap into the layers of narrative I hoped to reach.

The surname, Rookes, of the women who ran The Widow’s Coffee House was an irresistible pun. Rooks are notoriously clever gregarious birds. Rookery isn’t just where rooks nest, it can also mean deception or trickery. Bird is a derogatory word used for a woman that objectifies her as a simple sexual thing. As I went through what documentary evidence survived about The Widow’s Coffee House, it became clear that these women had been successful, well-off, and were cherished by respectable friends. Because they were successful women operating in a business world dominated by men, they inevitably became associated with C18 London coffee house scandals about women who didn’t just work in coffee houses, but were also thieves and prostitutes.

I wanted to make work that included rooks, images of the Rookes women, and a silver coffee pot, which the last of the women had owned and left in her will. The coffee pot was a high value high status object that seemed to me an ideal symbol of their success and respectability.

I also needed to create a free voucher that visitors could use at the museum instead of paying an entrance fee. At the same time, another reason I thought this story would have other layers was that Bury today is celebrated as an attractive town because of its thriving ‘cafe culture’. Coffee shops and the women who work in them today epitomise respectable success. I had recently seen Tania Kovats’ exhibition Oceans at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Although her subject matter, oceans and water, had nothing to do with coffee houses, she had collaborated in a way that seemed to me perfect for representing many layers of perception. She had collected samples from seas and oceans worldwide by inviting members of the public via social media to participate.

I made a Coffee Token that visitors could find and collect from coffee shops in Bury to use as admission vouchers. It incorporated my own version of a C18 coffee token, which was an illegal coin created by coffee houses in those times when wars had led to a crippling cash shortage. Rather like the financial crisis in Britain since 2008. I had approached Bury’s coffee shops, and many agreed to offer my tokens as well as collecting used foil coffee bags for me to use in my work. Here is my token:

I used the collected coffee bags to make three rooks for an installation in the museum. They were to represent a worthy Rooke, a business Rooke, and a tarty Rooke. I created a nest for them filled with coffee paraphernalia from as wide a timescale as I could gather.

I also created two ‘portraits’ of Widow Rookes’ daughters, painted in acrylic on broken coffee cups, pots and saucers glued to marine ply. I wanted them to look disrupted or complete depending where the viewer was. I’d been inspired by the plate paintings of Julian Schnabel, but couldn’t use his scale or oil paints because there wasn’t room in the alcove the Museum was letting me use, and no time for oil to dry.

Finally I made a giant ‘silver’ Coffee Pot and Stand as close in style to one the Museum agreed might have been the one left by Letitia Rookes in her will. I installed this as close to the site of The Widow’s Coffee House as I was allowed. This gave me an excuse to contrast the pot with the bright green summer grass of the graveyard. I fixed an information card to the installation directing viewers to the town’s coffee shops and my coffee tokens, so they could easily find the pieces in the Museum itself.

The next stage in our degree was to make work in collaboration with another person or organisation. They needed to be local, or getting the work installed would be very difficult. I wanted to pursue my cine film investigations.

Our local art-house cinema, the obvious place for me to approach, was embroiled in a monopolies and mergers investigation, and its future was in doubt. The East Anglian Daily Times were reporting about it. They were too distracted to collaborate with me.

After more head-scratching, I decided to make the most of where I lived, and keep the project geographically manageable, by trying to collaborate with Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds. Here is a movie about it! This museum has a really rich collection of social history – a multitude of narratives to tap into – so I thought it would be a great place to find sources for my project that extended what I’d begun with the cine film pieces.

I visited the museum to investigate and discussed my project with its staff. I was surprised to find no evidence of a 17thC coffee house I’d heard about, which had been run by women beside the town’s Great Churchyard.

I did more research. The Widow’s Coffee House was created by widow Mary Rookes, and continued by her daughters Letitia and Mary Rookes. They ran it from their home, wedged between the walls of St James’ Church (now Bury’s Cathedral) and the Norman Tower. The Rookes sisters are shown in a 1748 map of Bury either leaning from its upper windows, or imprisoned there. This image is taken through glass and therefore poor quality, but the map is too old to safely un-frame for this photo.

Rumours have persisted over centuries that these women provided other disreputable services as well as coffee. One even has it that when they died, because of their unsavoury lives, their bodies had to be buried half-in/half-out of the church.

The more I researched the coffee house, the more ambiguous the representation of the Rookes women appeared. It felt like an irresistible opportunity to continue working with multilayered narratives and build on what I’d begun with the cine films. The Rookes saw themselves as successful and respectable, whereas other people telling their story over time saw them very differently. Their building has long since been pulled down, but its site is open to the public, and seemed to be crying out for a site specific piece of work inspired by them. Here it is:

I discussed making work for the museum as well as the Great Churchyard site, the museum staff were really enthusiastic and helpful. With their help I got permission to make work for both locations. I needed to decide what to make.

I’d looked at the work of various artists, in particular, Peter Doig, Daniel Richter and Murat Sahinler, for my cine film project. I hadn’t seen their work first hand. While I was making my catalogue I managed to see Peter Doig’s show No Foreign Lands at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

I loved this exhibition. Not just because it was such an interesting journey through this artist’s work, but also because it was curated so well. Although the Gallery is emphatically traditional in its architecture, almost underlining that you are in Scotland’s capital, the way this work filled it meant the work really did transport me through Doig’s other lands. The building has huge walls, and this exhibition made full use of the space and light, so I felt caught-up in the fun of working on this scale and with this much colour and variety of texture. There was even a room plastered with his film posters, all made at speed for his local film club in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Doig’s paintings are based on his particular visual experiences and photographs, which is a different perspective than the multi-layered one of my old cine film source. However, I had been selecting frames that I personally found visually exciting, and I often knew as little about the actual narrative of those images as Doig did, for example, when he worked from his photograph for Lapeyrouse Wall. There were several versions of this work in the show. It is one of my favourites. Doig had investigated and experimented with uninhibited gusto in these paintings and sketches. Seeing them made me realise how much more I might have achieved with my own photo-based images. Not in a depressing way – it was a useful lesson for my future work.

Peter Doig. Source photograph for Lapeyrouse Wall, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 2002, from the artist’s archive.

Lapeyrouse Wall
Peter Doig, 2004. Oil on paper, 235 x 1229 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fractional and promised gift of David Teiger in honour of Gary Garrels.

Poster for Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival
Peter Doig, 2008. Oil on paper, 76 x 105.5 cm Collection of the Artist.

Lapeyrouse P. o. S. Pink Umbrella
Peter Doig, 2003. Oil on paper, 41 x 31.5cm, Bruno Brunnet & Nichole Hackert, Berlin.

Lapeyrouse Wall
Peter Doig, 2004, Oil on canvas, 200 x 250.5 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fractional and promised gift of Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro in honour of Kynaston McShine, 2004.