Materials: Hay bales, hay nets, horse hair, felt, rescued fragments of fabric from Uppark’s 1989 house fire, leather, reigns, jewels.
Remnants was a site-specific installation based in the stables. This evocative space houses many of the charred remains from the house fire at Uppark in 1989, but the scuffs and hoof marks of the empty stable bays also reveal the traces of the horse who once stabled there.
My response has been to use fragments of burnt and charred fabrics from the house fire to re-create horse coats, feeding bags and partial elements of clothing. There are also objects made from hay, partially formed horses in thick felt, horsehair and reigns made from leather.
Suspended and embedded within the space these fragmentary elements are designed to draw out the stories of the building’s history and to play on the idea of horses as status symbols via fleeting glimpses of jewels within the bales hidden in and around the bays.
I am fascinated by the history of the space and the markers – the traces literally etched on the walls and floors – left by the former occupants. It is these elements that have informed my intervention within the stables.