The film which I mentioned a few posts ago is now up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUd_vBFlxs4
Part of the findings of the AHRC ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior 1500-1700’ network, it explores how research into surviving documents relating to houses can be brought together with extant buildings and objects, digital media and modern craft skills to help us to understand how the early modern domestic interior functioned. So the whole thing is an argument for interdisciplinary ways of approaching the topic.
The film starts in Melissa White‘s studio, with her thoughts on how early modern painters created the wall painting from which she was working – her detailed analysis of their work – and her own practice and the raw materials she has used. It then moves on to the hall at Bayleaf (shown here), to my discussion with Danae Tankard about who would have lived in a house like this, and how it would have been furnished, and what the documentary evidence is for our ideas about this. In the final sections the three of us discuss how people might have interacted with these cloths – their visual impact on both the modern & the sixteenth-century viewer, and how they work in the hall space. One of my favourite parts of the film is the part where the digital media becomes a part of the research: the timelapse photography (like the film itself, beautifully shot by Darren Mapletoft during our night in the house) where you can see the way the cloth changes in the shifting lights of dusk and sunset, fire and candle, dawn and sunrise. We’d be very interested to hear which parts of the film you’ve found useful for understanding domestic life…
Material Histories 