Great Expectations
“An everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.”
(George Orwell)
Great Expectations : Minuments to Kent is a multipart collaborative project looking at the interconnected narratives of the people who have moved to and from the area, from the Stone Age to the present day.
Conceived in the aftermath of Brexit and following the failure of the White Horse at Ebbsfleet Landmark, (Mark Wallinger’s proposed monumental 50-metre-tall White Horse sculpture, sometimes referred to as “The Angel of the South” which was put on hold following the 2008 economic crash.) The work aims to explore the diversity of Kentish identity.
Selected Objects from Great Expectations:
Minuments to Kent
2026
Kent as seen through the ghosts of the past and the possibilities of the present. As both a “Garden of England” and a “frontline.” A home, a place of nostalgia, comfort and sanctuary, of bounty and opportunity but also of injustice, neglect, division and othering.
Interwoven repeating stories of Aspiration, Anarchy, Resistance, Duality, Movement, Innovation, Conservatism, Collectivism and the Bucolic. The stories we tell about ourselves, the stories others tell about us and the stories we tell about others. The work draws inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s small scale “travelling museum" (Boîte-en-valise) as well as curated museum collections such as “A History of the World in 100 Objects”.
This is an ongoing collaborative project, if you have a story to tell about Kent or would like to be involved in creating a small artwork for the series please contact me.
“There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”
(Derek Jarman)
