“The White Lady’s Casket”: a site-specific text work for Bishops’ House, Sheffield, UK by Christine Kennedy (1996)

The White Lady’s Casket was created for the exhibition Buildings and Contents: contemporary art in a museum context, 26 October 1996 – 23 November 1996 held at Bishops’ House, Sheffield. The exhibition featured new site-specific works by members of the Sheffield Contemporary Arts Trust. Permission for the exhibition was granted by Sheffield City Museums, and the event was supported by Sheffield Art & Museums and Yorkshire & Humberside Arts.

I was one of fourteen Sheffield-based artists to contribute to the first exhibition of its kind for the city’s oldest remaining timber framed building. For the last two decades the Bishops’ House has been used as a public museum with seeks, in the words of its own publicity, ‘to explore the lives of those who have lived and worked in Sheffield from 1500 to the present day’.

I used the words of the Bishops’ House Information Sheet in a cut-up procedure, selecting them in random groups and then composing sentences and phrases with them. These fragments of text offer an imaginative engagement with the house and its past by the re-presentation of a historic language embedded in the past of the building itself, like a form of automatic writing. These imitation fragments of historic writings were distributed about the house, in the walls, floors, doors and windows. Over the month that the exhibition took place I visited occasionally to move these fragments about, removing some and bringing new ones in, in imitation of a poltergeist-type movement of objects. This procedure and the titling of the work allude to the two stories of hauntings associated with the house, the White Lady apparition, and the poltergeist that opens the small locked casket in the bedchamber. The random cut-up procedure, and the effects this brings about in language, also express the ambience of the unpredictable and bizarre nature of these manifestations.

In the creation of this text work I used imaginative techniques to try and ‘remember’, and even though this is a ‘false’ memory it was my hope that this would trigger new ideas about the innumerable forgotten people and events belonging to the house. Museums and history are cultural constructions that both remind us and allow us to forget.

The White Lady’s Casket was published in a handmade book for sale at the exhibition in a signed limited edition of 20. The entire text generated for this exhibition was reproduced in this publication, together with a short essay.

In Spring 2002 Reality Street Editions, a leading UK publisher of innovative poetry, republished the entire text of The White Lady’s Casket with a revised essay. This is included in the volume Renga + , which also showcases innovative writing by Guy Barker, Elizabeth James and Peter Manson.

Renga + is available from Reality Street Editions, 63 All Saints Street, Hastings TN34 3BN, e-mail to info@realitystreet.co.uk and is priced at Ł5.00 (plus p&p), ISBN 1-874400-19-9

Christine Kennedy