Emily Orley

A place-specific installation with a soundscape created in collaboration with Tim Dutton, as part of the Shunt Lounge, London Bridge. The work was inspired by the colourful history of the London Bridge area and Orwell’s 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell stayed in a doss-house on Tooley Street in the early 1930s when he spent time living as a tramp in London. Down and Out provides an evocative record of his experiences, some of which are alluded to here. Tooley Street, which runs alongside the Lounge, was also where 68 people died in an air raid in 1941. Popular legend dictates that there was so much rubble that bodies were simply left behind, and re-buried in the masonry under London Bridge Station. While the installation paid tribute to their ghosts, it also referenced the hive of industry that existed in the area in the 18^th Century, which grew up around the busy wharves: the ship-wrights, the tanners, wool-staplers, parchment and rope makers, anchor-smiths, calico dyers, and pin and needle manufacturers.

"I had worn bad enough things before, but nothings at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had – how is one to express it? – a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness.”

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

A brief performance installation at the Easton Community Centre, Bristol. Part of the sixth You and Your Work Festival. A dining table was slowly and deliberately laid with an ever-increasing array of cutlery to create a small-scale but epic landscape.

photos© Mel Shearsmith

A year-long web-based dialogue documenting the discovery and response to the new places in which we found ourselves after moves to opposite ends of London.

A site-specific performance installation at the Resistance Gallery, London. Part of the fourth my site | in space, curated by Switch Performance Company. The gallery, underneath the railway arches in Bethnal Green and not far from where Jack the Ripper’s victims were discovered, is thought to have been the site of an opium den and later an air raid shelter. For the installation a track made from knives and nuts spelt out a rhythmic message in Morse code.

A performance installation at the Chelsea Theatre, London. (Also performed at PSI 14 conference in Copenhagen, August 2008.) Miniature landscapes - scenarios of catastrophe and creation, love and loss among the world’s nations – moved across the space on six free-standing butler trays. This was a performance which constantly made and unmade itself, creating images using dust, sand, model figures, domestic utensils, comestibles and international kitsch. 

photos© Matthew Fink

A performance installation with mirrors, torches and a hammer, involving the making and breaking of a series of images in response to the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Shunt Lounge, London.

photos© Elinor Brass

An immersive installation inspired by the history of the site of the Camden People's Theatre. It involved five hundred found objects, suspended, whitened, and scattered across the space. Suspended, as if in water. Whitened, as if petrified over time, washed-out by age, by use, by neglect, by forgetting. Colourless litter, archaeological remains, a constellation of accumulated history. Sound by Tim Dutton.

  'Hauntingly beautiful and calm ... visually arresting'. Andrea Ioannou, Arts Hub, 30 April, 2008 (Read full review)

photos © Emily Orley (http://www.orleyandbrass.com/hampstead.html) 

 A site-specific performance installation tracing puddles with electrical tape. Shunt Vaults, London. 

photos© Juliette Humble

Photographs of a small-scale site-specific installation exploring the history of  the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London. Commissioned by and exhibited at Execution Ltd, 91 Brick Lane.

photos© Emily Orley (http://www.orleyandbrass.com/execution.html)

Photographs of a small-scale site-specific installation exploring the history of the Pleasance Theatre, London. Exhibited on site

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 photos© Emily Orley (http://www.orleyandbrass.com/pleasance.html)

Photographs of a small-scale site-specific installation exploring the history of the Mayfair Library, London. Exhibited on site.

photos© Emily Orley (http://www.orleyandbrass.com/rich.html) 

'"You are here," insist the arrows on maps and guides. How many of us really are?'   Lucy Lippard