Old Fire Station
40 George Street, Oxford, OX1 2AQ
T: 01865 263980
www.oldfirestation.org.uk
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate release, 3rd Oct 2014
Local artist creates landscapes and traces human behaviour and
history through mark making on used kitchen chopping boards
At the Old Fire Station’s current exhibition, Oxford based artist, Miranda Creswell, delves into our past through the
marks we make on objects. Using old kitchen chopping boards and working with the traces of ‘chop marks’ left
behind on then, Creswell creates half remembered, imagined landscapes.
The artist was first inspired by her involvement in an ongoing research project called ‘EnglaID’, run by
archaeologists at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, which looked into the changes and
continuity of the English landscape between 1500 BC and 1086 AD. Working with archaeologists, Miranda Creswell
was introduced to the ideas of human marks in objects and the relevance of these to how humans lived in the past.
While Miranda works with kitchen chopping boards that have marks that have been made much more recently, they
are still an indication of human behaviour; tracing of each meal made feeding one or many people, for many types
of occasions. A number of the boards have been donated by Oxfordshire people and families.
The landscapes created on the boards are imagined, referring to where the boards originated from as well as
Miranda Creswell’s experience of making lengthy studied drawings all over England for the ‘EnglaID’ project. The
landscapes are also inspired by one of Miranda’s ongoing projects where she draws a daily landscape in a sketch
book; something she has now been doing for over two years.
The exhibition will contain both large scale and miniature works. The large scale drawing entitled ‘Moving through a
moving landscape’, touches on experiencing landscape while moving through it, and how landscape itself is nonstatic. The smaller and miniature landscape works are inspired by Iron Ages coins and the wonder of the small-scale
seen in the cusp of a hand.
ENDS
Notes to Editors
- For further press info, high resolution images or interviews please contact Anna Munday, Marketing
Manager, Arts at the Old Fire Station anna.munday@oldfirestation.org.uk / 01865 263988
- Chop Marks runs from 10th October – 8th November
- All events and exhibitions can be viewed on the Old Fire Station website, www.oldfirestation.org.uk
Miranda Creswell
Miranda Creswell studied at Camberwell School of Art in the 1980s and has since then held many solo and group
exhibitions in the UK and abroad, for instance the Menier Gallery (London) , Modern Art Oxford , Ely Cathedral ; in
Leiden, Holland ( as part of a 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth) and in the British Art Exhibition in Perm ,
Russia. She has taught in Brixton Prison, for the educational outreach work at Modern Art Oxford and in the hospital
school at the John Radcliffe Hospital.
She has, in the last few years held an art residency at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Harris Manchester College ,
Oxford and for Helex (Centre for Law , Health and Emerging Technologies , University of Oxford). She is currently
project artist for EnglaID, a project on the English landscape , University of Oxford Archaeology Department.
Arts at the Old Fire Station
Arts at the Old Fire Station is a charity and social enterprise offering performances and exhibitions for all to enjoy,
support for emerging artists and enterprising ways to sustain and develop art as a business. We have a shop, a
gallery, a theatre and a studio and we work closely with Crisis Skylight Oxford to enable homeless people to access
training and work. We aim to help artists make and showcase work, to entertain and engage the public and to help
homeless people develop skills and confidence.
www.oldfirestation.org.uk | Facebook: www.facebook/artsattheoldfirestation | @ArtsatOFS