Dave Charlesworth: Visions from the top of a maypole

Dave Charlesworth: Visions from the top of a maypole

Curated by Gavin Ramsey

A solo exhibition featuring new work by Dave Charlesworth selected from a recently completed Arts Council England funded residency project at the Yorkshire Film Archive (YFA). 

The installation sees Charlesworth suspend a maypole in Vitrine Bermondsey Square’s unique 16-metre long gallery window and surround it with a series of abstract still images taken from the films made during his residency, which will simultaneously be screened.

Charlesworth’s mixed moving image and performance practice exposes fragmented personal histories and generic social phenomena as avenues to explore experiences of the contemporary British landscape. 

Taking as a starting point “The Fall and Rise of the Barwick Maypole” (1978) - a documentary depicting the traditional taking down, re-painting and raising of the maypole in the centre of Barwick-in-Elmet village, a process once conducted by hand involving the whole village- Charlesworth searched the YFA for footage recorded in the first ten years of his life. The result is a body of work that transposes personal biography onto the register of an archive; examining the role that information curation and management plays in constructing narrative understandings of place and landscape and exploring how fragments of moving image materials are filtered between communities and archival authorities and contribute to notions of ownership and narrative.