Foil emergency blanket, steel tubing, wire and fixings, assorted stickers and adhesive decals, 215 x 130 cm
Perhaps an extended title would read: ‘Peggy Seeger, Roberta Flack, Andy Williams, Alison Moyet, Leona Lewis, the fucking Stereophonics plus 144 others’.
On the iTunes Store, there are available to buy 149 versions of the song ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Ewan MacColl - actor-turned-folk-singer-and-writer,
famously monitored by MI5 for his communist sympathies - apparently penned the song after a bet that he couldn’t write a love song. MacColl called the scores of
cover versions made of the song a ‘chamber of horrors’ (perhaps another subtitle for the work).
I see ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ by Jamie George as being in the territory of the cover versions, something that loses all sense of location or origin, a
muted stamp of mawkish authenticity all over it.
Location as an idea prompted the object and my understanding of the curatorial scheme of the exhibition. The gallery as a claiming place, a kid stickering objects
in their room, locating/describing themselves through imagination, affiliation, desperation.
I had this image in my head. I wanted to make an image of a person holding up a homemade blanket - an object with no obvious front or back, an object made for
their home, and holding it at arms length. It’s flag-like, it says this is mine, it’s used here.
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© Jamie George