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Jam

Jacqueline Butler and Sylvia Waltering's work from an ongoing project titled the Mrs Day Archive

School of Art staff and students exhibit at Bury Art Museum

7 March 2018

Inspired by First World War archive

A new exhibition inspired by Bury Art Museum’s First World War archive will feature work from staff and students at Manchester Metropolitan University.

All are invited to a preview of Archive Mediations – Contemplations on the Home Front on Saturday March 10 at Bury Art Museum from 2-3pm.

The exhibition is curated by Jacqueline Butler, Head of Media at Manchester School of Art, and is inspired by the Beyond the Battlefields exhibition she co-curated with Professor Melanie Tebbutt at Grosvenor Gallery last month.

The artists will be working across a range of media to create interventions in the museum’s First World War exhibition spaces.

There will be an opportunity to try some canapes and sweetmeats from the 1915-1918 period made by Butler. One of the dishes will be installed in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition, where it will naturally disintegrate, transforming from a plate that nourishes to decomposing matter as a reminder of the consequences of war.

Individual jars of jam prepared by MA student Paul Cliff will also be on sale as memorial works, reflecting the fact that soldiers on the battlefields often ate only jam and dry biscuits due to short food supplies. Each jar has the individual name of young men from Bury that died during the First World War and acts as a small memorial to the men that served their country.

Butler said: "Engaging in this project and working with staff, both at Manchester Metropolitan and Bury Art Museum, students and local artists has proven to be such a rich experience.

“In the year that marks the centenary of the end of WW1 discussions with many of the artists and students has resulted in sensitive, subtle and emotive work."