In the original 1992 of this work, Campbell positioned herself well above the audience – as a remote figure in time and space. The physical focus of the work (to the point of fetishisation) was the skirt made from a sixty metre length of ribbon onto which Campbell had hand-embroidered in three languages (French, Scotch and English), a letter attributed to Mary Queen of Scots used to implicate her in the murder of her second husband. The embroidered text could be read in electronic close-up through monitors dispersed amongst the audience with a live feed from a video camera near Campbell as she slowly unwound the ribbon. Mina Kanaridis sang the soprano section of William Byrd’s Mass for Four Parts live on each occasion.
In 2021, for the exhibition Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia, Campbell mounted a Redux of the work, performing with Clare Grant and Agatha Gothe-Snape and soprano Hannah Bleby. On this occasion, Campbell, Grant and Gothe-Snape circled the suspended skirt in a fugue-style reading of the embroidered letter. Bleby opened the performance with a solo of the Kyrie from Byrd’s Mass and concluded it with the Agnus Die.
Images
