A permanent installation commissioned by the National Archives at Kew as part of the new museum housing important documents, including the Domesday Book.

When I began this project, I didn’t realise the enormous wealth and scope of images held in the National Archives, not only within the image library itself but also in basements full of treasures. The overall spirit of this project was to ‘animate’ the archives, reading the images primarily as visual information, conceived to encourage subliminal, tentative, ambiguous, organic and fragile associations, challenging usual archival categorisation and opening infinite cross-referencing potential. I wanted to retain in the work, my own excitement as I stared intensely into diverse faces, possibly not looked at for decades, and the sense I had of them gazing back. The whole project became a voyage from the initial process of opening boxes to finally finding an abstract narrative within which each image could resonate.

The seven screens of the work ‘talk’ to each other over centuries and across the globe and then way out into the cosmos with the inclusion of recently unclassified UFO drawings from all over the country. Galloping, flapping, whirling and splashing throughout the work are Muybridge’s horse, eagle and ladies putting on shawls and throwing water from buckets, layered into often eerie animations.

With the physical proximity of the actual Domesday book to this installation, I was also constantly aware of the beginnings in real terms of the ‘day-of-judgement’ outlook on society, no-place-to-hide mentality, surveillance, being constantly answerable and the classification of people into statistics. Yet, contrarily, what mostly surfaced was that human beingness, with huge resilience and vibrant fortitude, remains primarily uncatchable and finally unarchivable.

All images copyright National Archives/Anne Bean
Soundtrack: Spooky Drums by Baby Dodds.