New and fine.
Working and reworking The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane, first translated into English by William Morris, this project traces the text back to its earliest known version, attributed to Adenet le Roi. What emerges is a form of translation that resists fidelity in favour of transformation: words become images, images become gestures, movements, and sound, slipping the constraints of the page through continual acts of re-making.
Developed for The Nature of Gothic at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, the work proposes an unlikely collaboration across time. Morris’s resistance to industrialisation is brought into dialogue with a contemporary Lancashire shaped by its industrial afterlives, fragmented, weathered, and unevenly held. Translation becomes a method of encounter: between craft and collapse, ornament and industry, past and present.
The narrative is rewritten as Factory Weather, a contemporary text grounded in landscape and movement
“They had stood at the town’s far edge, where the moor begins its slow, stern rise…”
Alongside this, the work returns to the book as object. Morris’s Kelmscott Press edition later formed the basis of the 1894 Tregaskis Bindings, in which seventy-six binders produced unique interpretations of the same text, an early model of distributed authorship and material translation. Now held at the John Rylands Library, the collection frames the book not as fixed form but as a site of variation.
In this context, Factory Weather operates as both rewriting and rebinding: part of an ongoing lineage in which language is worked, reworked, and released again into form.
