The Dining Room at Uppark provided the stage for one of Amy Lyon’s early famed performances. Did she or did she not dance on the mahogany table for Sir Harry and his friends when she was 15? Was she nude? Over the almost two centuries since her death in 1815, Amy – later transforming into Emily Hart and finally Emma, Lady Hamilton – has been a screen for various projected fantasies about women. She is the hyper-sensualised/sexualised object of the male gaze, the beautiful object/ subject of painters, the lover of Nelson or his nemesis, the ‘vulgar woman’ first acclaimed, then rejected, by polite society. Alternatively, she is an important artist whose ‘attitudes’ – classical and mythological tableaux, created in Naples – are a forerunner of performance art and interpretive dance.

My work is often about the marginalised or outsider and in this installation I use video projected through layers of semi-aluminised mirrors to reflect some of the fragmentation of a complex life. There is no one optimum viewpoint; there is always a different way of looking at things.

Emma was always a composite construction. She was partly self-made and partly constructed by others. The piece on the table celebrates her at the height of her self-actualisation before her final, sadder end. The main performance in the video is intertwined with fragments of the significant series of marine paintings by Claude-Joseph Vernet collected on the Grand Tour and displayed in the Dining Room. Emma’s life is intimately connected with the sea, most especially through her relationship with Nelson, and of course Emma herself became a part of the Grand Tour in Naples. The ‘stories’ embedded in the installation contain a variety of references to her life and times ranging from the statues of dancers uncovered in Herculaneum, Greek vases collected by Lord Hamilton, to the classically inspired dancers on a Wedgwood mantelpiece and the paintings of Emma by many artists and, most significantly for this piece, by Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun.