In Touch, In Ruin, Hannah Buckingham, Harry Payne, James Wylie

In Touch, In Ruin presents an immersive new exhibition that merges cutting-edge technology and experimental art to explore themes of memory, placemaking, and local heritage.

In this exhibition, local heritage is echoed through whispers, dreams and refractions of light. Three emerging visual artists delve into the archives of The Mary Rose, a sunken warship that has been resurfaced and is now preserved in a public museum. This experience has culminated in an exploration of kinetic and embodied approaches to heritage, interrogating how stories unravel depending on who they are held by, how they are preserved and to whom they are addressed.

“Silt: which shapes and undermines continents; which demolishes as it builds; which is simultaneous accretion and erosion; neither progress nor decay.” Graham Swift, Waterland

By closely studying preserved objects in a museum setting, the artists have used that as inspiration to create new works that respond to ideas of intangible heritage, preservation, boundaries, sustainability, and embodiment. These intersect through and within boundaries that are formed and broken within the limitations of human handling, questioning whether heritage can ever be presented without transformation. In using new technologies, the artists have found ways to demystify heritage and the medium; making history more accessible and embodied, and presenting technology as a resource that is very much embedded in the natural world.

Hannah Buckingham imagines a bed of silt; a shipwreck that becomes a queer ruin. This immersive dreamscape gathers textiles, beeswax, sound and projection, to bridge the gap between bodies in a Mary Rose fiction of queer desire. Viewers will be invited to rest their head in another’s place, to merge with the artwork in an intimate interaction of physical touch and sensorial experience.

Harry Payne uses ceramics to facilitate a technological investigation into how memories decay and offers a way to activate them through the human hand. Payne’s experience of visiting the museum at an early age formed the basis for his commission, whereby what he remembers and what is now lost of that initial experience is recollected in fragments and morphed perspectives.

James Wylie is fascinated by the remains of the shipwreck being a resource for local wildlife. Exploring how historical wreckages and ruin become a vital life source for the natural world, critiquing the human need to resurrect the ship, as the ‘artefact’ turns from a man-made object into a source of food, shelter and sanctuary for marine life.

Through sensory-driven “memory installations” the artists animate collected histories; lost stories, secrets, and lingering messages, woven into objects that reimagine our relationship with the past. Engaging in new technologies, their practices revive archives with intimate, physical resonance, inviting audiences to feel heritage rather than simply observe it.