‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, 2012–13

solo exhibition at MK Gallery (Milton Keynes), Arnolfini (Bristol) and CCA (Glasgow)

‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’ traces connections between several of my projects, which focus on historical and contemporary forms of education and its relation to the so-called Protestant work ethic, as famously described by sociologist Max Weber. Drawing on social history, the series of five ‘period rooms’ that make up this solo exhibition explore different educational models to emerge in the industrial and post-industrial eras – starting with the religious pulpit, and ranging from world fairs to television and Google. The installations look at opposing ideas about the purpose of education, training for the workplace versus education as an emancipatory practice. With a strong architectural dimension – involving the fabrication of platforms and models and a deliberate emphasis on play and game-like structures – the exhibition invited visitors to participate and ‘perform’, while considering how social roles and models of society have been constructed over the last few hundred years.

Exhibition catalogue/artist’s book published by Sternberg Press (2016), with essays by Maeve Connolly, Angus Cameron, Lars Bang Larsen and Tirdad Zolghadr. Edited by Olivia Plender and Gerrie van Noord.

Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden), 2012

suspended mobile, floor piece of green tape

In the mobile that makes up half of Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden), the hierarchy of British society is presented as a pyramid. At the top sit the crown, lion and unicorn (which can be found on British passports), followed by a manor house. Below, separated from this paradise by a heavy gate, are human labour and raw materials, extracted from both Britain and the colonies, upon which the pyramid stands.

The green lines on the floor, which make up the other half of the work, follow the plans of a grand country house garden.

Social Construction, 2012

architectural toy set and posters to assemble 31 different institutional structures

This work is based on the Anchor Stone Blocks, a popular learning game patented by Friedrich Richter in 1884. The game owes its logic to a system developed by Friedrich Fröbel, the German nineteenth-century educational reformer and inventor of the kindergarten. He advocated ‘free play’ in childhood and to this end made a series of toys that he named ‘gifts’. They were meant to encourage different stages of a child’s development, while being open enough in form to engage their creativity. Unlike Fröbel’s version of the blocks (the sixth ‘gift’), Social Construction is a ‘closed’ game, which educates players about the institutional structures that make up mainstream society. Only a limited number of building options are presented on the posters, including a church, a school, a military academy, and even a cultural institution.

Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire), 2007

The board game tells the story of the enclosure of the commons, a process that began in Britain during the sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. As described in the game’s rules, it was symbolic of the shift from feudalism to modernity and was essentially a privatisation of the land, whereby ‘commoners’ lost their traditional rights of access to the meadows and forests that had previously sustained them. Subsequently, the now impoverished rural poor were forced to migrate from the countryside into the factories of the newly industrialised cities in order to work for wages. In this rigged game, debt is the only feasible option with the sole avenue of release from the downward cycle being to ‘set sail to The Levant, where the law can’t reach you’. A player makes their fortune by reproducing this system of exploitation in the colonies, following which they are allowed back into the game at the top of the hierarchy: as the owner of the bank.

Honey Makes Money Makes Honey, 2012

wicker beehive

A wicker beehive (or skep) was representative of the perfect industrious society in the Victorian period. The use of the beehive as an emblem has a long history in Freemasonry, on trade union banners and in the Co-operative Movement. George Cruikshank also famously used it in his satirical cartoon The British Beehive (1867), which appears elsewhere in the exhibition, to represent the economist Adam Smith’s idea of a hierarchically organised society in which there is a clear division of labour.

Stockholm Duck House: Proposed Monument to British Parliamentary Corruption, Circa 2009, 2012

architectural model of painted wood and lead, brass plaque

An image of the Stockholm Duck House was widely circulated in the British media in 2009, becoming the symbol of a corruption scandal, in which many British MPs were found to be fiddling their parliamentary expenses and claiming money for inappropriate items from the public purse. It was an aristocratic Conservative MP, Sir Peter Viggers, who famously claimed for the ‘Stockholm Duck House’. The structure, designed to provide protection for the birds, is based on an eighteenth-century building in Sweden. His expenses files reveal that British taxpayers also footed the bill for 28 tons of horse manure. Fellow Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, Third Viscount Hailsham, claimed the cost of cleaning the moat around his country estate.

The New Jerusalem, 2012, mixed-media installation and video

Filling the gallery are two architectural models that use display methods from the past in order to demonstrate the relationship between imperialism, trade and religion.

Empire City – The World on One Street (2009) represents the British Empire Exhibition, which took place in the West London suburb of Wembley in 1924. As an event, its purpose was to educate the public during their leisure time about Britain’s trading relationships with its colonies and bolster support for imperialism. In 1924 it was the largest exhibition that had been staged anywhere in the world, and the pavilions were piled high with theatrically displayed commodities, produced by countries that Britain ruled over. One of the most absurd examples was a life-sized refrigerated statue of the Prince of Wales riding a horse, carved in butter, which occupied the Canada pavilion. At that time, butter was one of Canada’s main exports to the UK. Human exhibits were also included, with over 60 West African people housed in 'native villages' in the pavilions representing Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The model mixes the plan of the British Empire Exhibition with the fictional topography of John Bunyan’s widely read evangelical allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

O wretched man that I am, that I should sleep in the daytime!

—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

A model titled The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me (2012) reveals the journey to the Celestial City recorded in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the nineteenth century, this book was instrumental in educating the factory workers of the industrial revolution, illustrating the principle that the only route to paradise was through hard work. In many respects it exemplifies German Sociologist Max Weber’s famous theory about the relationship between puritanism and the ideology of work. In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920–21), Weber argues that the Protestant work ethic was vital to the emergence of modern capitalism.

Market, 2009, video, 10 min. 9 sec.

Accompanying the models is a video titled Market, shot in a contemporary London street market in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. Next to the traders sits a red brick neighbourhood named the Empire Estate. In the 1920s, the British Empire Exhibition was the main engine behind the westward expansion of London and was used to advertise and promote new ways of living, suburban lifestyles in which ‘pioneers’ and their families were encouraged to settle in the ‘colonies’ surrounding Wembley. Parallels can be made with contemporary mega events, such as the London Olympics of 2012, which similarly exemplified the ideologies of ‘progress’ and competition, changing the urban landscape and the demographics of whole city districts.

Britannia Receiving her Newest Institution is a banner embroidered in the Arts and Crafts style, in which Britannia is seen holding a miniature version of the Selfridges department store in London.

The Structures and Institutions of the Universal Summerland, 2007, framed ink on paper drawing

An elaborately framed drawing, from my graphic novel A Stellar Key to the Summerland, illustrates the progression up the social ladder that can be made in the afterlife – from slum dwelling to utopian socialism, as exemplified by illustrations of Charles Fourier’s phalanx and Robert Owen’s New Harmony.

Machine Shall Be the Slave of Man, But We Will Not Slave for the Machine, 2009, diorama

A diorama representing a Kibbo Kift camp, with an industrial city and smoke-belching factories in the background.

Three programmes, produced as course material in collaboration with the BBC, were shown on monitors in the installation. In Children and Video (1976) young children, aged 7–9, work with light-weight video cameras and recorders to make their own episode. Play and Place (1976) demonstrates how children’s play evokes larger society and environment on a miniature scale. In Whatever Will Be (1977), futurologist James Dator analyses the modern world and suggests how it can be improved through alternative lifestyles, communes and adventure playgrounds.

TAD 292, 2012, archival display

As part of the exhibition I curated a display of archival material from The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course which was officially titled ‘TAD 292’ (referring to Technology, Art and Design). The archival presentation comprised course material, including television programmes, letters, vinyl records, artworks, posters, course books and other printed matter.

Art and Environment emphasised ‘playfulness’ and creativity as tools for liberation, aligning itself with many of the activist movements emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Women’s Liberation, the Community Arts Movement and Environmentalism. Students were asked to start with their own experiences at home, mapping their locale and the environment around them, in order to make art that was relevant to society.

Entrepreneurial Garden, 2012, mixed-media installation

At MK Gallery, the foyer was transformed into Entrepreneurial Garden, a red, blue, green and yellow Google-style working environment with relaxed seating, a coffee machine, plants, table football and basketball hoop, along with motivational prints. This installation seeks to explore how distinctions between work and leisure, public and private, are collapsed within the apparently playful workplaces characteristic of contemporary media companies. Google’s stated mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, an educational claim which has led me to question what kind of information and knowledge are being privileged by this profit-driven framework.

Visitors were encouraged to use the Entrepreneurial Garden as a working environment. An accompanying release agreement (paraphrasing those found on social media platforms) states that any intellectual property produced within the space becomes the property of MK Gallery, and that by reading the text, users of the space immediately indicate consent to its terms.

Proposal to Remodel Arnolfini, 2012, is a satirical proposal to transform this art institution into a work space for the creative industries, which takes the form of an architectural model of the building.