Responding to the traces and echoes of former lived presences within Preston Manor has taken the form of making discreet prints with my blood onto objects placed within the bathroom; a room where our private and most intimate selves are expressed in discreet, often solitary bodily routines; where activities of ablutions and evacuations express the inside/outness of our sometimes unruly physical selves.

Preston Manor has all the fullness of deep, lived time, its architecture speaks of times past and now time through which we wonder, linger and imagine. Its status as a museum dictates certain conventions: in my case a care for surfaces, a delicate negotiation to not print directly onto the walls, glass or ceramics of the building as I would ordinarily do in a contemporary gallery, but instead to introduce sympathetic surfaces on which to hold the blood prints:

Four laboratory glass dishes in the bath 
One laboratory glass dish balanced on the holder on the wooden stand
One laboratory glass dish on the small wooden holder near the toilet
The linen towel on the wooden rail above the bath
One glass shelf.

The words tissue and textile share etymological origins; in Old French the noun tissu meant ‘woven, interlaced’,  from the Latin texere ‘weave’. This interweaving of the biological and the textile unravels in the work. The lace patterns suggest the decorative and cultural structuring of threads and gaps that curtain our privacy, and yet allow our peering outward into public space. Printing blood onto laboratory glass dishes tugs at associations with microscopic peering, organic matter abstracted from our bodies’ everydayness.The linen towel witnesses feminine bodies, and cycles of bleedings, spillages and stubborn stains. In contrast the print on the glass shelf is infinitely fragile as the blood dries into brittleness and eventually, dust.