Last christmas
Last Christmas is an exhibition by Becky Shaw opening at Black Box Project Space, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham this month.
18 Nov 25 – 7 Jan 26 | Open Weekdays 10am-4pm | Mulled wine opening and artists talk Monday 17 November
In Last Christmas, Becky brings together her interest in Christmas iconography, with work from a three-year interdisciplinary and international research project. Justheat explored people’s emotional, social and political connections to types of heating. By bringing together works from Justheat and a focus on Christmas, Becky reflects on the problems of time, nostalgia, culture and our experience of change.
After listening to over thirty oral history interviews about experiences of heating, Becky became particularly interested in the problem of energy ‘transition’. When we tell stories of the past, we ‘live’ with our histories in the present. The construction of the stories moves back and forwards in time, selecting events based on intensity and meaning. This contrasts with powerful, ‘top down’ historical and political narratives of energy eras, like ‘the age of coal’ or ‘net Zero’.
To explore this non-linear experience of time, Last Christmas brings together a series of animations and videos that experiment with how ‘transition’- the movement from one image to another - happens. In addition, a series of lenticular postcards invite visitors to pick them up and try to find the exact moment when the past becomes the present. These works sit within the ‘stage set’ of a Christmas fireside, inviting us to think about our daily performances of keeping warm.
The show is accompanied by a zine that brings together some of Becky’s collection of Christmas cards and shop windows, noting the repetition of Christmas firesides, smoking chimneys and snowy skies. None of these ingredients are common in contemporary UK Christmases, where climate shifts, diverse communities and urbanisation change the experience. However, these images remain stubbornly part of UK Christmas sentiment, year after year.
With thanks to: Black Box: @blackboxuca | www.blackboxprojectspace.squarespace.com