Artist tour
13 October 2016, 6 – 7 pm
FREE talk and walk around the installation within the manor house with Alice May Williams.
To reserve your FREE place please call 0151 427 7231.
Join Alice May Williams for a walking tour of the fascinating ‘Speke of the Future’ contemporary art installation at Speke Hall, to hear more about her inspirations and making process.
Following a two month residency at Speke Hall, artist Alice May Williams presents a new commission that draws on the hall’s Arts and Crafts heritage. Taking William Morris’s ‘News from Nowhere’ as a starting point, Williams imagines the potential futures of Speke Hall and the National Trust in the year 2200.
The installations map out a fictional future of the house by illuminating the patterns of the past, not only those visible to us, such as the William Morris wallpapers and tales of Adelaide Watt, but lesser known characters such as the Whatmores, caretakers of the house in the 1930s.
“Whilst thinking about the project, I was inspired by William Morris’s 1890 utopian fantasy ‘News from Nowhere’ which imagines London in 2102” says Alice. “In it, he sees a vision of a future ideal society as being a return to a pastoral era, where money has ceased to exist, everyone is healthy, happy, and cities have turned once more to countryside”.
Installations based on artefacts of the future will be spread around the ground floor of the house and the home farm area. Including the Morning Room as frequented by Adelaide Watt, the Great Hall, the Morris decorated Estate Office or ‘gun’ room where Ms Watt’s companion Miss Lee-Steere once kept her gun, the scullery where a young Tom Whatmore used to fix his bike, and the Oak Parlour, home to the stained glass Watt family crest, which is the only visual reference to the house’s historical links to slavery and the sugar plantations in Jamaica.
This exhibition is FREE to view and enjoy with normal admission to Speke Hall, wed – Sun 11am – 4:30pm. Until 27 November 2016.
Free admission to National Trust Members and 5 years and under.