Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice…
Anne-Marie Creamer’s film explores themes of bereavement, loss and memory, through the reconstruction of a lost space – the bedchamber of Sir John Soane’s wife Eliza who died suddenly and tragically in 1815. Soane never got over her death; the room was left undisturbed for 19 years and he created private allusions to Eliza throughout the Museum.
Working closely with the Museum over several years, and undertaking extensive research in the collection, through a combination of photogrammetry, CGI animation, sound, voice, and song, Anne-Marie’s film is an imagined recreation of Eliza’s bedchamber, and a reclamation of Eliza’s presence.
Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice… was shown at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London from 9 March – 5 June 2022, with an accompanying programme of events that explored related themes of memory, memorialisation, and bereavement – how we deal with dying and remember our dead, as well as contemporary artists relationship to historical characters. Follow the link below to see some documentation of the exhibtion.
You can watch the film below. Please watch full screen.
Follow the links below to read an interview with Anne-Marie and a short essay on the project by Tom Jeffreys.
Follow this link to read a short essay on the film by Tom Jeffreys.
Follow this link to read an interview with Anne-Marie about the project.
Follow this link to see documentation of the exhibition.
Follow this link to Anne-Marie’s website.
Follow this link to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Follow this link to Verity Standen’s website.
Anne-Marie Creamer’s work experiments with cinematic and theatrical forms, often linking theatre, painting and cinema, researching and developing scripted narratives that reveal lost or hidden histories.
Her work is regularly shown internationally at galleries and museums, including: FRAC Bretagne, France; Yantai Art Museum, China; Exeter Phoenix Galley; Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Netherlands; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Aspex Arts, Portsmouth; and The Drawing Room Gallery, London. Residencies include Center for Contemporary Art Prague & British School at Rome. Commissions include work for the Italian Association of Architecture, Rome, and Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum Norway.
She has also worked as a curator and talks programmer at Delfina Studios Trust and Parasol Unit, and she was part of Cubitt Artists collective in the 1990s. She studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art; she teaches at Central St Martin’s, University of the Arts London.
Credits
A film by Anne-Marie Creamer
Photogrammetry: John Griffin, Arc Minute Ltd
CGI animation: Edmund Brown
Music: Verity Standen
Lyrics: adapted by Anne-Marie Creamer from the diaries and letters of Sir John Soane and family friends
Performed by Helen Cockill, Natalie Farr, Ellie Showering, Verity Standen
Recorded and mixed at Jack Drewry Studios, Bristol
For Sir John Soane’s Museum, London:
Dr Louise Stewart, Curator of Exhibitions
Dr Erin McKellar, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions
Fiona Smith, Public Programmes Manager
Helen Dorey, Deputy Director & Inspectress
Sue Palmer, Archivist
