VULGAR ERRORS: Hugh Aldersey Williams & Amelia Crouch in Conversation
FRIDAY 24TH MAY 5PM-6.30
HUGH ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS in conversation with AMELIA CROUCH
FRIDAY 24TH MAY 5.00 /£5.00 on the door
Over the past few weeks artist Amelia Crouch has been exchanging ideas with writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams about the writings of 17th century Norfolk philosopher Thomas Browne, whose statue dominates the Haymarket in Norwich. Their conversations on contemporary and historical fibs, falsifications and fancies will form the subject matter for Amelia's work in the Project Space over the Festival period. Using animated video, drawing and digital print, Amelia will be making experimental text works based on recent newspaper headlines and political speeches.
About the Queen of Hungary Project Space: Organisers Dominique Rey, Chloe Mandy & Stephanie Douet. Between 2001/4 Stephanie Douet and Dominique Rey ran the Queen of Hungary gallery in Norwich, showing experimental site-specific work by over 70 national and regional artists. The Queen of Hungary Project Space builds on their experience; it provides an artist-led space that caters for the needs of regional artists to network, to upgrade their skills, to have a place in which they can try new work in a supportive environment, whilst maintaining the uncompromising ambitions of the previous gallery.
For further information visit www.ameliacrouch.com / www.hughalderseywilliams.com
Image: Ian Newey, 'Queen of Hungary, Winter'. Digital image.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Amelia Crouch
To book a place contact stephdouet@gmail.com. Wheelchair access, parking. 0044 7900 330 032
THOMAS BROWNE: Thomas Browne (1605–82) was a true Renaissance man – physician, philosopher, moralist, writer, antiquarian, naturalist, herbalist, chemist and alchemist, mathematician and geometer, a missionary for the rational who could still find a place for the mysterious.
Browne settled in Norwich at the age of 31 and went into medical practice. During the Civil War, he trod a line that avoided partisanship, attending the Royalist and Puritan sick alike, as well as the poor, all of which made him the most celebrated doctor in what was then England’s second city.
His considered response to the unrest was his most famous work of literature, Religio Medici, in which he set out his personal credo of a reasoned Christianity tolerant of other religions. He employed his scientific intelligence (the literal story of the Ark is disproved for him by the existence of distinctive animal species in the Americas, for example) to establish a basis by which a rational man might nevertheless be a believer. ‘I borrow not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason,’ he wrote.
He made pioneering observations of Norfolk flora and fauna, including the first record of some birds in the county; he kept a bittern in his yard, and made perceptive observations about birds’ migration. Aside from his major works on morals, he wrote elegant digressions on mortality (Urn Burial) and on form and pattern in nature (The Garden of Cyrus).
Perhaps his most pertinent work for today’s audiences is Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, a compendium of common mistaken beliefs and old wives’ tales, each of which he proceeds to debunk in characteristically tolerant fashion with gently humorous prose – an approach all too absent in today's shrill debate about science in society.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
