I spent a joyful part of early July drawing in the Jewry Wall Museum. The staff were marvellous, and brought out boxes of ambiguous artefacts as well as 'themed' boxes of animal patterns and human/god forms. I was even given a desk to work at for the duration.
There was a fair blend of artefacts with and without known provenance, and when later that month I started to consider what I might do with these observations it became clear that there was an impossible amount to choose from.
I'm not sure that I could explain my initial selection process, but it involved picking one or two items from distinct historical periods in Leicester, and every artefact had to come from within the city. I choose some items that were easily recognisable but also other images that would be unintelligible. I settled on thirteen, but later dropped it to twelve, which was also the number of experts I intended to interview (six cultural and six academic representatives).
I had a dilemma still to solve. In the original project I had intended to create objects, and eventually display them amongst actual artefacts when they were being examined. I no longer had this freedom, nor did the object idea appeal. In previous studio work I had being playing around with palimpsests, and I had already created a set of written on, scraped away and written on again pieces. The idea came to me to create 'icons' on parchment of this set of twelve artefacts to suggest their 'original splendour'. But then to create palimpsests by scraping away at the images to represent the wear and tear on the artefacts as they are today. This process felt like a suitable metaphor for many of the ideas behind the project, and also created bizarre collection of irregular-shape animal hide pieces to show to interviewees.
