The Missing
Residency and exhibition at The Mint House, Pevensey, 2024-2025
Artist’s books, video, artefacts
Together with six other East Sussex artists, I took part in a residency at the 16th century The Mint House, Pevensey, in September 2024. Each artist responded in their own way to the house’s evocative spaces and its history. The residency culminated in Gathered, an in-situ group show in May 2025.
My installation addressed the house’s 20th century history as an antique shop, when visitors’ tours were popular and invented stories were presented as fact to ‘the wandering tourist’ with ‘a taste for the fanciful, the uncanny and queer’.
I focused on a tiny chamber once called The Haunted Room and its history as a site of performance. During house tours an invented story was told to visitors that several centuries ago a ‘lady had her tongue torn out hence it is haunted’. This violent act was inititated by a jealous gentleman when he discovered she was seeing another man, both lovers subsequently suffering a horrific death.
In the film The Missing the camera zooms in on a postcard of the room’s 1912 interior; a poem is recited; a man retraces the room’s missing walls taken out many years ago, then screams for the missing: missing walls, people, stories, histories, voices.
Cameraless cyanotype and lumen photograms portray the diamond paned window, the only surviving witness to events that never took place.
Three ringbound artist’s books collate archival documents I collected about The Haunted Room and artworks made inspired by it, as well as paraphernalia from my own history of ‘missing’. Overlaid on one of the books is a lasercut artefact of the handwritten word ‘tongue’ copied from a postcard sent by a visitor of The Haunted Room retelling the tale to a friend in 1923.
At an event on Sunday 4 May I retold the fictional story of The Haunted Room in the space itself and read my poem The Missing, continuing the room’s history of performance and storytelling.
GATHERED artists were Roelof Bakker, Elizabeth Doak, Kathleen King, Felicity Parkin Bell, Tony Pulford, Clare Shoosmith and Clare Somerville Perkins. Curated by Elizabeth Doak and Clare Shoosmith.
The Missing, residency and installation as part of Gathered. Residency September 2025, exhibition 2-4 May 2025.
The Missing, three ring-bound artist’s book. Works on paper, various sizes, mixed media. Tongue, lasercut perspex.
The Missing, video colour, sound, 7 minutes 8 seconds.
The Diamond-Pane Window, cyanotype prints, various sizes.
The film The Missing includes the recording ‘Il Flauto’ by Jeroen Huisman and Roelof Bakker from the cassette ‘Don’t Use Violence’, BAK Tapes, Arnhem, The Netherlands, 1984.
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