'Like Father Like Son'
Mapping the Site of the Soane Museum
2008
Humanities Seminar Room
Royal College of Art


This project was a competition to place site-specific work within the Sir John Soane's Museum. The winning entries were exhibited in the Reflection exhibition in 2008. The brief was:

"to respond to a place or a space, to communicate or reflect an aspect of the collection that connects with themselves. To make a piece of work that provokes thought or reaction to the collection or life of Soane."

As a museum that aims to conserve and preserve the detail and history of Sir John Soane, I was interested in the Museum's restrictions and boundaries. I chose therefore to map out the site of rules, explicit or customary, in the Soane Museum and tested out the following:

Physical Space

I made work (below) that was slightly too large to fit into any space in the Museum. However, the work was modular and could be split up, reduced, rearranged to fit most spaces. In this way I tested the extent to which the museum was willing to change the way it thought about its own space and the fixedness of its objects in order to accommodate my work.

Art and Beauty

The Museum owned works of middle-eastern and oriental antiquity as well as pastoral and representative paintings such as the works of Tuner and Hogarth. In response to this I used Egyptian paste to make a labyrinth. These are both usually associated with beauty and high culture and would be familiar aesthetically to the Museum. However, I undermined their acceptability through naieve and seemingly unskilled making. I asked the Museum to accept the work as beautiful and relevant.

Public Profile Agenda

Museums by their nature tend to exalt. Politically they write and reinforce social history and identity. I was therefore drawn to the story of Sir John's disastrous relationship with his younger son George when I discovered that John Soane had created an Act of Parliament to govern the house to ensure that his son would never inherit it.

The work called 'Like Father Like Son' emphasised this difficult relationship where the Museum tried to hide it. The maze was a metaphor for the complexities of Victorian father-son relationships and etiquette. It alluded to the maze of the House itself and how father and son could not find each other. The challenge for the Soane Museum was its willingness to accept and highlight a different perception of Sir John Soane.




Conclusion

Through this work, I challenged three sites of control within the Soane Museum. Control of physical space, its vision of what was art and beautiful, and the public image of John Soane.

The work was 'exhibited' or enacted during the selection interview where it was presented to the Museum panel. Each aspect of the mapping was presented to the panel and discussed. The site was mapped at the points where the panel chose to reject the work for reasons of size, ugliness or inappropriatenss of subject matter.