JUST/UNJUST at the London Design Biennale, representing the City of Leeds. Matty Bovan was commissioned to complete the project and chose to collaborate with Rory Mullen and Adam Leach on an installation.
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 8
- Type
- K - Design
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Reinterpreting a carved chimneypiece depicting the ‘Dance of Death’, JUST/UNJUST parses the concepts of damnation and salvation though the language of fashion, performance and sculpture. In the installation, based on an example from Burton Agnes Hall, Yorkshire, scarecrows displace skeletons as arbiters of judgement in the danse macabre, these more profane symbols examining how our secular culture processes theological themes.
New garments by Bovan and objects by Mullen and Leach become ‘liturgical’ instruments in a ritualistic danse macabre performed by the artists, a projected video of this frenzied destruction forming the backdrop against which the scarecrows (made from salvaged materials) are seen for the show’s duration. These sport Bovan’s bespoke garments alongside appropriated and made objects, ‘symbols of earthly vanity’: crowns, gold, money. Trampled underfoot during the performance, some of these occupy display cases – enshrined relics from another time and world – while others litter the floor.
For the London Design Biennale, Bovan represented the City of Leeds, who commissioned JUST/UNJUST, with £50,000 funding. He spoke at the Frieze Art and Fashion Summit, and the Evening Standard ran a feature titled: “How Matty Bovan became one of the UK’s most exciting and subversive designers”. Coinciding with his catwalk show at London Fashion Week, JUST/UNJUST brought Bovan’s work to new audiences in the trans-disciplinary context of Somerset House, which pioneers new models of creativity in which artists, designers and small businesses share common cultural space.
Influenced by Anne Hardy, British folk craft, and Wael Shawky’s puppets, JUST/UNJUST uses the aesthetics of destruction to re-examine the new. The fashion collection, arguably the most potent symbol of the new, is morally inflected, the installation’s title taken from the grouped figures in the original chimneypiece: the Just, about to be received by angels, and the Unjust, shortly to be claimed by the Devil.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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