Artists > 2010: Framing Identity > Suky Best
Suky Best The Flowers of the Mansion 2009
Work
The Flowers of the Mansion Suky Best 2009
This is an animation constructed with archival images, live footage and sound all taken from Tatton Park.
The room Mrs Waugh and Lady Beatrix Egerton occupy as they await their guests contains an amalgam of domestic objects normally located in different parts of the Mansion. Through the window the Italian Garden can be seen, bringing live action into the composite vintage postcard of the sitting room.
Two voices bring us into the respective worlds of the house and garden: Marian Littler, the Mansion’s flower arranger, and gardener Peter Lofthouse. Both relate their daily rituals and duties and the journey of the flowers, from bed to bouquet, becomes tangible.
The interior life of Tatton Park’s Mansion, alluded to as ‘The Towers’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives & Daughters, is a stifling class-bound world of manners and etiquette where men enjoy freedoms and privileges prohibited to women; the animation suggests this dichotomy with the immobility of the interior spaces and the dynamism of the world outside.
Biography
Suky Best is an artist working with print, animation and video. She recently made The Park in Winter, Arts Council England’s online Christmas card; Early Birds, an Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 in association with Arts Council England; About Running, a moving image commission for The Great North Run; Stone Voices, a permanent sculptural piece for the Devils Glen in Ireland, and From the Archive, an animation for the main reception area of University College Hospital, London. She has exhibited at the Baltic Gateshead and in Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain (works made in collaboration with Rory Hamilton) and has had solo exhibitions and publications, including The Return of the Native, Pump House Gallery London.
In 2005 she completed a Wellcome Trust-funded SCIART project, making animations for hospital outpatient areas. She was Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Wolverhampton (funded by the Henry Moore Foundation) 1998-2000, and has recently begun an MPhil research degree at the Royal College of Art investigating the relationships between birds and film.