House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown

About the Exhibition:House of Revision / House of Repair by Uma Breakdown is a project about love, restraint, liberty, pain, growth and collapse.

Commissioned by ‘a space’ arts for God’s House Tower, the exhibition explores alternative routes through time, drawing on fact and fiction to reimagine the past and speculate about the future.Working across drawing, fiction, animation, code and sculpture, the artist revisits the building’s past as a Bridewell, an institution established in the 18th Century to house ‘idlers, vagrants and prostitutes’.

The project asks what a place of spiritual and physical repair for people seen as ‘other’ might be, if freed from the authority of state and church that underpinned these ‘Houses of Correction’ and the subsequent systems they have evolved into since?Using the unique history and architecture of God’s House Tower, as well as the artist’s home of the North East, House of Revision / House of Repair imagines a sacred grove for fringe cultures and unconventional communities with alternative belief systems, such as ancient outlawed religions and pre-modern travelling performance groups, centering communal care at the edges of legality.Such models include the hundreds of years and thousands of miles journey of The Cult of Cyble which would eventually lead to a shrine in Corbridge, Northumbria.

Other models include outlawed performance from the Chester Mystery Plays to the parties closed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994.