After a few months of surviving on pretty small, not overly compelling jobs, I received a commission in my inbox. A medium-scale installation to commemorate the 750-year anniversary of a former palace, now a historic house open to the public. I would later learn that no one had actually ascertained whether this anniversary marked the laying of the first foundation, the day it welcomed its first inhabitants, or the first time it appeared in local records. When a site badly needs a cash injection it is incredible how irrelevant such details can become; a significant date is chosen, special events are put on, footfall increases. Sometimes the brief visibility afforded by marketing means film or TV scouts will stop by and be enchanted by the well-appointed rooms and breathtaking gardens. A block booking of a month or two, a significant fee. Then it is not a palace with a history, but the location of filming for such and such, and people come for tours, filling the café and gift shop. The email didn’t say these things explicitly, but in these places—unless the roof is about to cave in—money tends to be spent only with the anticipation of making more back. Feed the horse a sugar lump and hope it shits out a nugget of gold.

I have been deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary, and otherwise) in medieval buildings for the past twenty-two years. When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for a very good reason. When you come upon a room, cordoned off with red rope, beyond which you see an open book on a desk, a chunk of bread picked hollow, and a quill in an ink pot that is empty of ink, I am telling you something about the person who lives in that room. The ink may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.