This is a short extract of the film Dear Friend I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice_extract, on exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum London, March 9 - June 5, 2022
Total running time: 10 minutes 30.
Single channel animated digital film.
Date: 2022.
From Sir John Soane’s Museum:
“Dear Friend... is an immersive short film that accurately reconstructs a lost space – the bedchamber of Sir John Soane’s wife Eliza who died suddenly and tragically in 1815. John Soane – Georgian England’s leading architect - never got over her death, preserving her bedchamber for 19 years, and later creating private allusions to Eliza throughout the museum. A haunting soundtrack uses Soane’s own memoir of his grief at Eliza’s death to create a meditation on love and loss.
Through a combination of photogrammetry, CGI animation, sound, voice, and song, the film is an imagined recreation of Eliza’s bedchamber, and a reclamation of Eliza’s presence.
Alongside the exhibition, a series of events will discuss related themes of memory, memorialisation, and bereavement - how we deal with dying and remember our dead, as well as contemporary artists relationship to historical characters.
The recreation of Eliza’s room is based on photogrammetry of objects from the Museum’s collection by John Griffin of Arc Minute Ltd, with 3D animation by Edmund Brown. The film will have a choral soundtrack by composer Verity Standen, with lyrics by Anne-Marie, drawn from the diaries and letters of John Soane and close family friends. Dear Friend…is produced by Anne-Marie Creamer and Gary Thomas at Animate Projects.
The film’s development and production, and the events programme, are supported using public funding from the National Lottery by Arts Council England. It is also supported by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
*The film and exhibition title refers to an inscription hidden on the canopy of a model of the Soane family tomb, which is in the Library-Dining Room at the Museum. It refers to a passage from a now largely forgotten novel, Corinne, ou l'Italie by Madame de Staël, first published in 1807, where in addressing a portrait of his dead father a young man declares -
“Dear Friend, I can no longer hear your voice, but tell me by your mute gaze, still so powerful to my soul, tell me what I must do to give you in heaven some satisfaction….”
CREDITS:
Director: Anne-Marie Creamer
Music: Verity Standen
Photogrammetry: John Griffin, Arcminute
CGI animation: Edmund Brown, with extra modelling by Christian Flores-Nunez
Producers: Anne-Marie Creamer & Gary Thomas at Animate Projects
For Sir John Soane’s Museum, London:
Dr Louise Stewart, Curator of Exhibitions
Dr Erin McKellar, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions
Fiona Smith, Public Programmes Manager
Helen Dorey, Deputy Director & Inspectress
Sue Palmer, Head Archivist
Singers: Helen Cockill, Natalie Farr and Ellie Showering, with Verity Standen
Sound recordist and mastering, with Verity Standen, Jack Drewry Studios, Bristol
Link to short essay about Dear Friend by Tom Jeffreys
Dear Friend... in exhibition at the Foyle Space, Sir John Soane's Museum London, March 2022
Photography by Stephen White & Co.
An exploration of our new film installation, by Tom Jeffreys
When a ghost enters a room, it is said that you can feel the air temperature plummet. But what if the ghosts were here all along? In 1833, when Sir John Soane successfully lobbied for a private Act of Parliament to guarantee the preservation of his house in perpetuity (against the wishes of his estranged son George, whose objections were raised in Parliament by William Cobbett), it signalled the quiet erasure of another museum – one already present in the Soane home.
That museum, once the bedroom of Eliza Soane, returns now in spectral form through the work of artist Anne-Marie Creamer. Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice... is a beautiful haunting, lingeringly strange, its breath icy cold despite the sun's rays.
Dear Friend... tells the story of Eliza Soane's death in 1815. She had been ill for much of the year but her death was nonetheless shockingly sudden. Verity Standen's score and the four female voices create an atmosphere of charged intensity. Days and dates sound like a litany, an attempt to fasten the incomprehensible within a structure of order or sense: Tuesday November 21st … Wednesday November 22nd … Thursday November 23rd … But the event of death overflows, resists our attempts to understand. Even architecture becomes chaotic in the end. The sound of silence is a woman's voice lamenting loss. “...it is an awful silence...”
Creamer's title, Dear Friend... is from an inscription in French on the canopy of John's model of the family tomb. It comes from Germaine de Staël's 1807 novel, Corinne, which recounts a journey among Italian landscapes and monuments. Creamer's work also contains a sense of a journey. Every landscape is a product of all that has happened there – and this room is a landscape of a kind. Here we roam, curtailed by floral-papered walls, trying to make sense of what we see and hear.
The film's striking visual precision is the result of cutting-edge photogrammetry, a process by which objects can be modelled and places mapped through thousands of photographs. It's a technique often associated with archaeology and Creamer's work has undoubtedly involved archaeological processes of excavation and reconstruction. Through dedicated archival research she has collaged together words and phrases dug up from letters and diary entries by John Soane and others, threading together a three-act choral libretto of lamentation and loss.
By all accounts, John Soane never got over Eliza's death. His architecture is imbued with mourning and the public performance of widowhood became an important part of his identity. For nineteen years after her death, he ensured that Eliza's bedroom was maintained unchanged. In effect, the room became a museum – materially the same as it had been during Eliza's life but, in terms of function and significance, altered completely. In Creamer's film reconstruction, every object is imbued with emotional significance and symbolic possibility. As the libretto laments the coldness of a corpse's hands, we see the objects those hands once touched: a small Wedgwood urn painted with flowers by Eliza, or a cherished pair of embroidered gloves (to keep living hands from being touched by dirt or time). An unlit candle and a stopped clock gesture towards the possibility of a moment fixed in perpetuity.
From bedroom to memorial, the room remained preserved until that Act of Parliament. Whatever Soane's intentions, his legacy overwrote Eliza's life. The Romantics were obsessed with fame and posterity. Soane commissioned paintings that would depict his buildings far into the future, crumbling and overrun by plants. There can be no reconstruction that does not presuppose loss. No great legacy without anxieties over illness, vulnerability and death. We will each of us be outlived by the things we own. We remember lost loved ones through the things they leave behind, but all matter crumbles and memories fade to white eventually. These anxieties have new resonance today amid climate crisis and a Western culture of frenzied overconsumption. Maybe leaving a legacy isn't such a good thing after all.
The archive, like the crypt, is a dark and dusty place. Here, dust animates the bright stillness. A figure from the outside world casts a shadow across wooden floorboards, but it is a figure of stone. Colour leaches away and this small world is once more a pale, ashen grey place. Dear Friend... suggests quite subtly that the Soane has always been haunted – not only by Eliza Soane but by the Eliza Soane Museum that prefigured the John Soane Museum and was all but erased by it. All erasures leave traces, each trace a clue to a phantom. Now Creamer, as artist and researcher and psychoanalyst and detective, has uncovered each absent spectral presence for us to glimpse for a moment, if not quite ever to reach out and touch.
To learn more and watch Dear Friend in full, visit the Soane Museum exhibition page about the exhibition.
Tom Jeffreys is an independent writer and editor predominantly covering contemporary art and culture. His work has been published in Frieze, The Independent, New Scientist among many more, and he is the author of two books: The White Birch: a Russian Reflection (Little, Brown, 2021) and Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on foot (Influx Press, 2017).
Dear Friend... in exhibition at the Foyle Space, Sir John Soane's Museum London, March 2022
*DEAR FRIEND, I CAN NO LONGER HEAR YOUR VOICE, EXHIBITION, AT SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM, SPRING 2022
Still - Dear Friend, I can no longer hear your voice, exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, Spring 2022
The Piranesi prints above the fireplace were known to be in Eliza’s room. Taking 100’s of photographs of each of Eliza’s objects, from the Soane Museum collection, 3D models of each were developed for this digital film.
The vase, clock and urn (which Eliza decorated), are Eliza’s objects are known to be in her room. Taking 100’s of photographs of each of Eliza’s objects, from the Soane Museum collection, 3D models of each were developed for this digital film.
These gloves are Eliza Soane’s. She was given them as an heirloom as a young woman, they are believed to be from either the early 17th century, or before. Using numerous photographs of Eliza’s gloves from the Soane Museum collection, a 3D model was developed for my digital film.
The objects in this image are Eliza Soane’s, the gloves, fire-screen, cane chairs, sewing baskets, and pictures were her objects, or known to be in her room. Taking 100’s of photographs of each of Eliza’s objects, from the Soane Museum collection, 3D models of each were developed for this digital film.
The wallpaper, which features in Dear Friend, is based on photographs of the wall paper in Eliza and John Soane’s room. Images of it are used to structure Dear Friend into a 3 act structure.
The Storyboard developed for Dear Friend was a key part of the process, where Anne-Marie had to imagine and fantasise a room which no longer exists, and which she had never seen, describing a visual journey around the room .