The Shirley Card EXHIBITING at Sheffield Millenium Gallery
(extract from The Empire’s Old Clothes 2022)
Film/ Audio Visual, 4 minutes
Part of : Colour Exhibition Tour

The Empire’s Old Clothes is a short film that challenges the insidious myths and propaganda around the ‘British Empire’. It draws on influences, aesthetics and politics from Indian and Afro-Futurism, queer culture, and experiences of ableism and racism in post-Empire Brexit-Britain.

In The Shirley Card the artist challenges the ‘normal’ of white skin as an industry standard in developing colour film and photography.

Commissioned by Unlimited, and Disability Arts Online (DAO), with support from ONYX (a Global Majority/ POC & Dis/abled identifying Collective)

The Colour Exhibition

A MAGNET partnership exhibition, with Art Fund support and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

This exhibition brought together over 150 objects spanning art, science, nature and cultural histories, alongside a range of interactive activities. It explored a spectacular world of colour – how we see it, how it’s made, how it’s used and what it means.

There were artworks by Hokusai, Kandinsky, Bridget Riley, Andy Warhol and more, alongside examples of exquisitely crafted decorative ceramics. You could see beautiful bird plumage and iridescent insects which showed how colour is used in the natural world and textiles that demonstrated the rich spectrum of natural and manmade pigments and dyes.

Outfits including a diamante-studded Trinidadian carnival costume and Victorian mourning dress illustrated how colour can imbue clothing with cultural significance, while examples of pre-historic gold jewellery showed the value of colour across millennia.

The exhibition also featured a striking Rangoli sand art installation and a new large-scale mural by artist Grace Visions, created as part of Sheffield’s Lick of Paint street art festival.