Stage Left, Letter Pressed
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The Globe Theatre on London’s Southbank is indelibly associated with the plays of William Shakespeare, but his earliest productions – including the likes of Romeo and Juliet – actually debuted in Shoreditch at the Curtain Theatre, which is believed to have closed down by the 1620s.
For this year’s London Design Festival artist Rosie Reed Gold will exhibit a series of works inspired by this literary history – and that of the Caslon Letterpress Foundry, which operated in Hackney Wick in the early 1900s. Hosted by Hart Shoreditch, a hotel that has been a supporter of local artists and entrepreneurs ever since it opened in 2020, Stage Left, Letter Pressed will honour the written history of East London and how it lives on today – a mere stone’s throw away from the original theatre’s site.
The starting point is the interplay between ideas and space – for example, how the written word is manifested as spoken performance. ‘Letterpress is the mechanised embodiment of this,’ Gold says. ‘It takes ideas and disseminates them as letters – carved or etched – which are then duplicated through the process of print. This is then repeated during multiple performances of a play.’
At Hart Shoreditch words will take on yet another life – in the form of sculpture, video and sound. Interactive works will allow visitors to rearrange words into stories and poems; a stage area will host live poetry; and an installation on a spiral staircase reimagines Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene. Gold is particularly interested in the boundary between thought and action, and hopes these works will inspire self-expression.
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‘What ideas or feelings might we have waiting in the wings that are ready to be explored?’ she asks. ‘What narratives within us are emerging?’
This is Gold’s second exhibition in this space – the first, Linger (on display until mid August), features photographs that explore the uncertainty of seasonal changes. Stage Left, Letter Pressed is grander in its ambition, but as its heart again is an exploration of the notion of eternal change. ‘The central message,’ she says, is that ‘the story of your life is always being written, and re-written, and you are the author’.
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