Richard Heap
Portfolio
About
Tudor Protest
British Library
London
2024
--
Tudor Protest is the third of the British Library’s ‘pop-up’ exhibitions in the Treasures Gallery. Over the last year we have sought to create a space that pops out from the dimmed lighting and hushed displays of rarefied objects. For this final installment we tackled the theme of Tudor protest; from the peasants revolt to royal pretenders. Taking our lead from some of the incerdibly gnarly engravings found in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), I created a series of panels with his reworked figures. Isolated from their original compositions, blown up to life-size and then reconstructed into a seething human of tide of public rage.
Layered over this background we placed key figures from an accompanying animation (on screen inside the space). These playful and more light-hearted characters by illustrator and animator Allen Fatimaharan juxtaposed were with the period work of Foxe.