Public Art House has now ended and the works have been removed from the Duke of York and Wetherspoons Pub. Thank you for visiting. If you liked what you saw and want more, please sign up to our next project Hoodwink on Facebook.
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It is the Wetherspoon’s annual opera this weekend 24 March 2012 at the Opera House, Royal Tunbridge Wells, so the Eccentric Pub Opera has been temporarily removed from the pub. We’ll let you know when it goes back.
In the meantime don’t miss out listen via sound cloud.
Meet the artist, Jane Pitt 4 February at Wetherspoon’s Opera House, Tunbridge Wells
Meet the artist, Shelly Goldsmith 28 January at the Duke of York Pub, the Pantiles
Public Art House is co-funded by Tunbridge Wells Borough Council and Kent County Council.
Public Art House proudly presents the new work of artists Shelly Goldsmith and Jane Pitt. The artists have been commissioned to make a creative response to the Duke of York public house and the Wetherspoon’s Opera House public house in Tunbridge Wells. The new art work is complemented by museum objects selected by the artists from the collections of Tunbridge Wells Museum & Art Gallery.
Goldsmith’s work The Lovers draws upon the layers of romantic liaisons that have taken place over the years in the Duke of York public house, where stories are told and intimacies are revealed.
Is it the beer or the building talking? Pitt’s work Eccentric Pub Opera reveals hidden sounds of the Wetherspoon’s Opera House pub also once a cinema and bingo hall in her re-working of a traditional opera.
Visitors to the pubs can participate with the work by making their own versions of the pub opera or adding to our game of coded consequences.
The work will be on display from 5 November 2011 – 1 May 2012
The piece ‘The Lovers’ is inspired by common folklore regarding Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827) who was thought to bring his mistress to the Duke of York pub. The Duke, famed for his indecisiveness in battle as well as in love was ‘taken to the cleaners’ by his mistress and it is said that the well known nursery rhyme ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ is attributed to him.
Using reclaimed garments the site specific installation presents a parallel story, instigated by the historical research into the Duke’s life and the mid century (20th) black and white photo of young men playing darts, currently hanging in the pub.
The piece aims to draw upon the layers of romantic liaisons and social interaction taken place over the years the pub has been trading and the atmosphere of the pub environment, where stories are told and intimacies are revealed.
The worked garments are placed in the pub as if they have been mistakenly left behind; waiting for their owners to return and claim them.
Initial forays into the lost property at the pub revealed the array of hats, coats, scarves and gloves which have been left behind. One curious object, a pad with notes taken in shorthand became influential to the work.
Using a reclaimed male jacket and reclaimed female gloves, the familiar story unfolds. Profiles of two individuals are alluded to through a stream of consciousness, fleeting thoughts and emotions mirroring those of their historical counterparts and references how garments can reflect the experiences, history and shape of its wearer. Simple stitch is used to layer these imagined ‘outpourings’ or ‘stories’.
Developing the tradition of woven ‘name tapes’ sewn into clothing for identification, the tapes in the installation, used in abundance, have been woven with the story that defines the wearer’s identity, often a burden carried everywhere they go.
The gloves present their story in a series of shorthand scripted tapes. Shorthand was a common skill of the ambitious 1950s young woman. It references the historical story of Mary Ann Clarke, mistress to the Duke, who taught herself to read at a very young age and who made fame in publishing the secrets of her relationship with The Duke.
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Selected object - Pair of stuffed Pheasants
Date donated 1934
Provenance given by Miss E Brampton
Museum Collection Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery
Miss Brampton lived in Tunbridge Wells about 100 years ago. She gave these birds to Tunbridge Wells Museum, along with a grouse shot by the Earl de Grey at the stately home Chatsworth House.
It was very fashionable to have dead stuffed birds displayed as ornaments in lavish homes at this time. It is easy to admire the beautiful colours and patterns of the birds when they can’t move.
For pheasants love is a brief and unromantic encounter. A male bird will attract many female birds to his lair, where he mates with them then abandons them to look after up to 20 chicks at one time. It makes this pairing a romantic, if misinformed display…
For more information
RSPB
BBC - The Common Pheasant
Aldercreek Ranch - Pheasant
Selected object - Cash’s idenfication labels
Date around 1940s
Materials - paper, textile
Museum Collection Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery
Most people remember searching through the lost property bin when they were at school, trying to find the jumper with their name sewn in it, that they’d left in the playground the day before.. We think these ones are about 70 years old, but Cash’s have been making them like this for over 140 years now, and they’re still going. We obviously aren’t getting any less forgetful….
For more information
Cash’s Labels Website
Selected object - Advertising printing block
Date 1870s
Materials - engraved copper on wood
Museum Collection Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery
Our virtual world of desktop printing, where we create images on screens using mice and keyboards seems miles away from this little engraved image. It would have been used to print advertisements in newspapers for a local chemist’s elasticated stockings. But of course, this block was an incredibly time saving gadget in its time.
Thomas Hancock patented fastenings using the first elastic fabrics for gloves and stockings in 1820. Medical elasticated stockings are designed to increase circulation in the human body. They use strong elastic to compress the veins in the feet and legs so blood is forced towards the heart rather than pooling in the feet.
Shelly Goldsmith’s website
Shelly Goldsmith - Discovering a pad of shorthand notes in the Duke of York’s lost property was highly influencial to the work.
ik’sentrik pəb äp(ə)rə
Jane Pitt is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates participatory and interactive works in public spaces; such as magical peep-show installations for outdoors using pre-cinema moving image technology inside strange objects and sound tours creating instant mobile choirs, where participants vocalise phonic descriptions of everyday sounds encountered en route to compose sound poems unique to their location (i.e. kraaah = crow; pwssscch - usch = bus brakes; creee’uh’iiuck = creaking door).
For her Public Art House commission in the Opera House Pub, Tunbridge Wells, Jane has probed all the nooks and crannies of the building with her recording equipment and been regaled by the regulars and irregulars to create her condensed ‘Eccentric Pub Opera’ digital sound work. Layering actual recordings of sounds the building makes with customers voices (laughter and vocal reminiscences of the buildings past sounds) plus sounds that evoke the ghosts of entertainment past in the building’s century of variety, opera, cinema and bingo. She has created a soundtrack that will temporarily shift the listener’s experience of the pub as they listen amid the everyday hubbub; it will be installed in the pub for the public to listen to on headphones.
Jane has taken inspiration for the title from sheet music in the Tunbridge Wells Museum’s archive; Handel Parnum’s ‘Toad Rock Eccentric Dance’. Parnum composed several pieces specifically for Tunbridge Wells. In collaboration with Ian Beavis at the museum Jane has selected to exhibit a pair of ear trumpets in tandem with her sound piece, associating the focus on listening, the awareness of the acoustics of the architecture and the people inhabiting it with the amplification of the everyday that have inspired this work.
Jane would like to thank the following people who helped her to create the Eccentric Pub Opera:
All the pub staff and regulars for welcoming me and my recording devices
Stan & Doreen English
Chef John
Bill & his pal who likes dogs
Table 77
and the Monday Club chucklers
Jane Pitt’s Website
Jane Pitt’s Blog
Wetherspoon’s Opera House Pub
Selected Objects - Ear trumpets
Date 1860 - 1890
Provenance F Rein and Son, London, Unknown, F Rein and Son London
Materials - Silver plate, white metal, brass
Museum Collection Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery
When we can’t hear someone talking, we may instinctively cup our hands around our ears to help us hear more clearly. It’s likely that early humans developed this a little further by hollowing out animal horns or using shells as primitive hearing aids.
This ear trumpet works in much the same way. The thin tube is placed in the ear and the wide cone is turned in the direction of the sound. The cone picks up the sound and intensifies, or amplifies, it .The results were nowhere near as effective as modern hearing aids. Today’s hearing aids are also very small and not easily seen by others. It was very obvious when someone was using an ear trumpet.
Ear trumpets were made from a variety of materials including silver, brass and celluloid (an early form of plastic) and were sometimes very decorative.
The instruments were often specially designed for their owners. Beethoven was the most well-known user of the ear trumpet and in the 1800s, the inventor, Johann Neopmuk Mälzel, supplied improved versions to the composer. Four of those he made for Beethoven can be seen on the Beethoven-Haus website at the link given below.
Physick Medical Antiques Website
Hearing Center On-line – Ear Wax Museum
Hugh Hetherington On-line Hearing Aid Museum
Digital archives of the Beethoven-haus, Bonn
Selected Object - Toad Rock Eccentric Dance
Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery
Jane Pitt - An online taster of the installed artwork in the Actual Opera House, to enjoy visit the Opera Jam website, play the sounds and jam.
