When the John Gray Centre invited me to
join them as a Project Artist for six months I readily accepted, eager to
discover a new source of inspiration for my work and take the opportunity to
dive into some new research. As an Illustrator based next door in Edinburgh for
the last few years, I knew only a little about the county of East Lothian,
however after only a few hours with the team of archivists at the Centre I had
discovered a wealth of stories, characters and history.
Over the next few months I will work
closely with the team to explore the museum and archive collections and create
a series of illustrations and sculptural artworks that begin to bring the
collections to life. Alongside this I will lead some creative workshops at the
Centre that are also rooted in the collection. Throughout the project we plan
to have a few studio days at the Centre where visitors can ‘meet the artist’,
find out more about the project and see me at work. My creative practice has
always been inspired by travel, stories and places, so I look forward to travelling
around East Lothian drawing and hearing many more stories from the archivists.
One of the first artifacts the team showed
me inspired the first piece of creative work for the project. Lindsey
introduced me to the fascinating Haddington
Criminal Register. A beautiful object in itself, the handwritten ledger
documents the exploits of criminals in Haddington between around 1894 and 1901.
It details the offender, offence, time, place and the punishment given; however
interestingly it also offers a detailed physical description of each individual,
obviously no mug shots were available back then. In addition to a few comedy
errors in judgment, the ledger reveals some very young criminals, repeat
offenders, the mischiefs of those from a much higher class and also
surprisingly very little pattern or regularity to the punishments given.
In response to this interesting book I have
decided to create a series of short cartoons illustrating the crimes and
characters described, capturing their humour and hopefully some poignancy too. So
in addition to a monthly Blog post about my latest finds in the collection and
the development of the project, a new cartoon will be released on the John Gray Centre Blog each
week so keep an eye out!
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