Feast Wagons

Abstract

Feast Wagons was a collaborative project with Susan Walsh, featuring a large number of handmade carts and other transportation objects which became artworks in the installation shown at the Tetley Gallery in Leeds in late 2015.
In a series of new commissions, the exhibition explores the history of spectacular touring shows and the influence of cultural icons in the formation of personal and collective identity. Ideas of exchange, circulation and migration are considered through large-scale sculptural installations, painting, collage, video and textile works, alongside displays of archive material relating to John Robinson Whitley and an off-site billboard project which runs between the north and south of the city.
Across The Tetley’s First Floor Galleries.
The Feast Wagon looks at identity and nationhood against a backdrop of today’s globalised contemporary art scene, with its international biennales and large-scale touring exhibitions such as the British Art Show. But more specifically it engages with the demonisation of the 'other'.
The exhibition includes work developed for the exhibition by artists Simeon Barclay, Delaine Le Bas, Lubaina Himid and Susan Walsh in response to research by Leeds-based researcher and writer Irfan Shah. Shah has extensively researched Louis Le Prince, the moving image pioneer and his brother-in-law, the Yorkshire industrialist John Robinson Whitley.