Changing Room

Changing Room is a video piece centred around the ceramic works made by George Cammock throughout his life, set in a space that has been his home for the last twenty five years.At the age of 90, George Cammock is frail and nearing the end of his life, a life that has born witness to huge social and political change and upheaval. Some of these moments inform the script that has been constructed from both existing texts and the artists’ own poems and narrative that give shape and meaning to the work.The filmed ceramic pieces become characters that are avatar-like, in turn each artist – Helen and George, but also witness to what’s being said. The work seeks to use these ceramic animals to ask and show difficult questions around the construction of identity, and relationships, both historically and through to the current day. The lives of father and daughter span nearly a century in which black identity has been contested, fought over, and through which, the painful legacies of racism are still very much alive – this intergenerational conversation articulates how psyche and history are transferred.The video piece also considers questions around value and attribution, who gets to see what and why? Who becomes an ‘artist’ and why? And how can we value one activity over another? Who is an amateur, and who is not?Fragmentary in narrative style, Changing Room doesn’t aim to give a clear account either, rather Cammock has been interested to explore how image and text can give space and meaning to one another, how dissonance between what we see and what we hear guides understanding. And to leave space for the viewer to create their own relationships between objects and text. Ultimately though, this piece is perhaps a letter to a complex man and father, who was saddened and angered by the times in which he lived.Lisa Panting, 2014