“What do we make when we want to make something special? What does that say about us, and what we think is important? When we make, we manifest. A thing is in the house that wasn’t there before, and what on earth are you supposed to do with it? What is it to crown yourself, especially if you increasingly look like your mother, who recently died. Is the sparkle real, and does it even matter?”
Anna Marlen-Summers is a maker living in London. Having worked in arts education for over twenty years, she periodically oscillated between:
feeling that all her own creative practice has been obliterated, and all the remains is the occasional craft outburst;
deciding that the teaching itself is a creative practice (it’s just that she gave all her ideas to teenagers to do, badly);
wondering if perhaps just making things is good for you, and so it should be done.
Having now moved away from the classroom and into adult arts education management, as well as completing an MA in Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London, she now finds that in fact all three coexist in her practice, alongside an all-encompassing compulsion to collect and stockpile discount arts and crafts materials.
Manifest. Oh? is an exhibition of recent re-works created in response to the remnants of her previous exhibitions Trying (2022) and Trace (2021), a visit to Vienna (where she saw the relics of various saints in various churches and the bejewelled skeletons of Germany’s rural Catholic churches as photographed by Paul Koudounaris) and a vaguely remembered talk attended some time in 2010-ish. It is demonstrably NOT a manifesto.
A free exhibition, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.
