‘Jan from Spar’ is a collaboration with the band `Thigh High’, namely Hatty Carman and Tom Rasmussen who front the band. This piece accumulates the feelings we have harboured growing up in Devon and Lancashire, hating it, then moving to London and longing for our rural childhoods. Through falling in and out of love with these two dialectical spaces we’ve realised that London isn’t the cultural nucleus it is often advertised to be; some of the most culturally rich experiences we have witnessed occur in rural places.
In addition, specific encounters run through the work and are expressed through screen-printed text, knitted baler twine etc. Some of the encounters include; taking my dad into a rave tent; the smell of my primary school field after the rain, asking to read a mans phd thesis on the tube etc. I have also placed Hatty and Tom’s encounters; Hatty’s eight year-old scribed ‘I’m a Barbie Girl’ dons a digital printed bamboo hanging which forms the lyrics for Thigh High’s song ‘Barbie does consent.’
This work expresses the shift Hatty, Tom and myself have experienced in moving from rural villages to London; being caught up in a Capitalist cycle and realising village hall parties are sometimes better than the London rave scene.
