To their fixed station, all in bright array is a public rehearsal of a performance for hands through the portals of the Bermondsey Bothy in Southwark Park Galleries’ garden. During her residency in the bothy throughout 2023, Kelly Large investigated the Anchorite tradition: a mediaeval way of life in which individuals, mostly women known as Anchoresses, chose a form of solitary confinement that was both hermetic and gregarious.
Anchoresses lived in cells with small windows attached to community buildings called anchorholds, not dissimilar to the architecture and function of the Bermondsey Bothy. In their role as charismatic religious recluses and community advisors, Anchoresses were thought to ‘anchor’ the town where they were situated. However, some were wild thinkers – proto-activists, artists and writers that queered the social codes of Mediaeval society and used their anchorhold as a safe space from which to discreetly distribute divergent ways of thinking.
During her residency, Kelly gathered an archive of over 200 conventional and unorthodox hand gestures from diverse sources. With a group of creative allies, the archive has collectively been used to playfully develop their own waywood gestures for an imagined modern day anchoress, performed through the windows of the bothy as an unruly peepshow for hands.
