Great Expectations
“An everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.” (George Orwell)
During the three months of the Storytellers exhibition Hooden Horses (3 Men of Kent) will be joined by a number of smaller works. The “Great Expectations” series: Minuments to Kent will evolve and elaborate on Kentish identity to include narratives of Aspiration, Anarchy, Resistance, Movement, Innovation, Conservatism, Collectivism and the Bucolic occurring from the Stone Age to the present day.
The stories we tell about ourselves, the stories others tell about us and the stories we tell about others.
This is an ongoing collaborative project, if you have a story to tell about Kent contact me.
“There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” (Derek Jarman)
No.3 The Lioness and the Unicorn:
For Alessia Russo (Bearsted)
First Edition of Orwell Book & Russo England Away Shirt
Not for Sale
Born in Maidstone, Kent to Carol and Mario, Russo began playing football at a young age in a family of athletes. Her middle brother, Giorgio, has played non-league football for various teams, including Ramsgate
“England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.” Orwell
Orwell came to Kent and worked as a Hop Picker.
Great Expectations No.2 A Bird in the Hand:
For Rod Hull & Emu (Sheppey)
Bronze
4.5cm x 7cm x 18cm
Edition of 5
£750
Rod Hull was born on Sheppey in 1935. He later moved to Australia and began work as a lighting technician with TCN Channel 9 in Sydney. He then began appearing on air, notably as Constable Clot in Channel 9's slapstick comedy series Kaper Kops.
Great Expectations No.1 The Beaker Complex:
For the Beaker People (2500 BCE)
Rebecca Strickson Illustration (Margate)
Red Earthware, White Stoneware & Black Pigment
11cm x 10cm diameter
£300 each
The Bell Beaker culture, also known as the Bell Beaker complex or Bell Beaker phenomenon, is an archaeological culture named after the inverted-bell beaker drinking vessel used at the very beginning of the European Bronze Age, arising from around 2800 BC. Bell Beaker culture lasted in Britain from c. 2450 BC, with the appearance of single inhumation graves, until as late as 1800 BC,[ but in continental Europe only until 2300 BC, when it was succeeded by the Unetice culture. The culture was widely dispersed throughout Western Europe, being present in many regions of Iberia and stretching eastward to the Danubian plains, and northward to the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and was also present in the islands of Sardinia and Sicily and some small coastal areas in north-western Africa. The Bell Beaker phenomenon shows substantial regional variation, and a study from 2018 found that it was associated with genetically diverse populations.