The current art exhibition on display at Salle Culturelle Alfred-Langevin in Huntingdon is a challenging work. Created by Nathalie Boisvert and George Krump – both with theatre backgrounds, and Boisvert also an active visual artist – In the Footsteps of Mary Riley is described as both a multidisciplinary project and immersive installation. It combines varied media: photography, collage, found objects, original writing; and arranges them within the gallery in such a way that the space itself becomes part of the work.
Drawing from sparse historical records, the artists attempt to reconstruct the life of a 19th-century Dundee resident and local legend, Mary Riley. The installation unfolds in stations, each exploring different facets of this enigmatic woman: wife, mother, shrewd businesswoman, possible murderer, and alleged smuggler who hid contraband in her skirts layered and concealing, both a method and a metaphor. Cue the Russian dolls.
If In the Footsteps seeks to clarify, it also confounds – and that may be the point. Though in some ways visually spare, the installation largely occupies the gallery walls, where what’s presented is text-heavy and deliberately chaotic. We are meant to read and decipher, not just look.
The project seems self-reflexive. It is not only about its subject – Mary Riley – but also potentially about the very act of creating the artwork itself. With its speculations, looping narratives, flashes of brilliance, false starts and dead ends, the installation shows what the writing process feels like. The artists’ choice of materials and the work’s intentionally “lo-fi” aesthetic (photocopied clippings, bristol board, handwritten notes, and timelines connected by red yarn) suggests something provisional and unfinished. It borrows the visual grammar of police evidence boards and the obsessive ruminations of conspiracy theorists where the yarn, a nod to the Greek myth of Ariadne and Theseus, does not help us find our way out of the labyrinth – it only leads us deeper in.
Although the project touches on themes of immigration/migration and the social restrictions of women, In the Footsteps is mainly a speculative foray into the nature of storytelling, the way that stories both arise from and in turn create culture, and the way our own personal narratives shape and define us. The artists appeal to the authority of the real historical archive, and they also reject it. Photographs of actual places, real bottles and cans, barbed wire, copies of newspaper articles and historical documents mingle with poems, dramatic dialogues and imagined scenes written by Boisvert and Krump. Sometimes a historical record is altered – or is it corrected? Alternative “Marys” appear. What the artists cannot know they invent: Who is to say what really happened?
In a participatory gesture, visitors are asked to contribute their own stories to the Mary Riley mythology, an act that asks us to not be merely passive observers but turns us into co-creators and active participants in an ongoing process of cultural authorship. Boisvert and Krump are reminding us of how history and myth are often shaped both collectively and subjectively by the stories we remember and tell.
In the Footsteps of Mary Riley delights and frustrates because it resists closure. It trades in uncertainty and asks viewers to sit with it. The discomfort is instructive. What are we uneasy about? That the historical record is unreliable? That reality is less fixed than we’d like to believe, and “true” stories might be made up? Or perhaps because we know that, deep down, in short order, the details of our lives will be irretrievably lost and forgotten, as a printed banner in the installation suggests… and that just like Mary Riley, there will no longer be a definitive version of any of us: merely faint traces, suggestions, and gaps to be filled in by others – if we are lucky.
In the Footsteps of Mary Riley continues at Salle Alfred-Langevin until June 1.