Where we used to go, 2020. Centre of Gravity group exhibition, Soapworks, Bristol. Photos: Jo Hounsome Photography, Benjamin Jones.

Taking over a former department store, my installation used walls from the former furniture retail displays with ceramics, digitally printed wall hangings, and salt dough objects, to create a homage to the multiple histories of the building, as a consumer palace and soap factory.

Repainted Gardiner Haskins furniture showroom display walls, ceramic soap dish, ball and heads, salt dough fingers and eye, suede offcut, knitted textile sample.

The O from the Ercol sign.

Display units from the Gardiner Haskins mid-century furniture showroom are reconfigured into a new environment to mosey around. The work imagines the building’s different pasts, specifically its people, those who once worked here, manufacturing soap or selling and merchandising homewares.

Also, the behavioural patterns of visitors to the department store, the pleasure of shopping and the boredom of waiting, which it often entails. The ceramics and salt dough objects are like votive offerings, in a temple of many incarnations; a temple of consumerism, homemaking and productivity.