Still Lives by Rosemary Shirley

Open a copy of the full text


“I take it that any conscious configuration of objects tells a story. In fact this is something I’ve believed for a very long time…that any collection of objects was an ambiguously bounded unit that told a particular story, and it was by setting the boundaries that the story was told.” Susan Hiller

Lauren Healey’s recent installation Still Lives gathers together just such a collection of objects, bounded by the gallery space and waiting to reveal many possible narratives. These objects have been accumulated during her frequent visits to a local flea market, in the glass canopied space of Tynemouth’s partially restored Victorian railway station. Here Healey sifts through piles of ephemera: photographs, postcards, letters, scraps of fabric and odd garments – and selects those which are to be “rescued”. Re-homed and re-made, these objects begin a new cycle in their existence, moving from the personal sphere (where they had spent a great deal of time) though the commercial sphere of the flea market and into the public sphere as works of art.


Healey talks of her selection process as being intuitive and closely connected to the everyday. She has a preference for the mundane, and is drawn to objects and images which have a generic quality. The people and places in the photographs are not extraordinary, the lines of writing on the back of postcards do not tell of daring adventures or dramatic events. In fact many of the objects which surface in Healey’s installations could have belonged to almost anybody who lived in the UK during the first half of the twentieth century. This quality of everydayness means that the unrecognisable images, and unremarkable writings become separated from the things they refer to, they are no longer simply indexical. Their passage through time has made their physicality their defining characteristic, for example the curling corners, faded edges and scratched surface of a photograph assumes an equal, if not greater importance than the image itself. Their original communicative purpose is overtaken by their talismanic properties, they signal the everyday exoticism of the past.