Friday 21st May 2021 to
Saturday 12th June 2021
Alongside the presentation of her moving image work Unctuous Between Fingers (2019) at St Andrew’s Art Centre, Bryony Gillard has created a seaweed pressing video guide. Similar to flower pressing, seaweed pressing is a simple process to flatten and preserve seaweed specimens. Stored in the right conditions, pressed seaweeds can last for hundreds of years and conserves important biological data. A popular pursuit in the 1800 and early 1900's 'seaweeding' was often a women's pastime, many committed female 'seaweeders' made important contributions to marine botany. Unable to publish their research in their own names, they often passed their findings on to their male counterparts, but their collections live on in herbarium collections all over the world. Easy to learn but tricky to perfect, seaweed pressing is a brilliant way to get to know seaweed's qualities and taxonomies. How to press seaweeds, a video guide is available to watch online through Estuary 2021.
Bryony Gillard is an artist, curator and educator whos work attempts to create a space for genealogies of intersectional feminist practice that are elusive, messy and entangled in contemporary concerns.
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Bryony Gillard’s Unctuous between fingers is a moving image work that explores the archive of pressed seaweeds and algae held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, collected predominantly by women in the mid-1800s.
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