Apple Blossom Court, 01.10.19
1 Falkland Road, Wallasey
Apple Blossom Court is a care home in Wallasey providing personal care and support for its residents who have learning disabilities.
It is situated in the striking cream and brown Victorian building which was the former Priestley & Sons Photographic Studios. This is the studio where Sydney had his ‘graduation portrait’ made in 1914 when he left Wallasey Grammar School.
Alongside the Arts Council funding for the exhibition Photographs from Another Place, I was also granted financial assistance from The Elephant Trust to make a small artist edition multiple of the portraits on the original Gearing Ilford Tonelle Bromide postcards from the 1940s, gifted to me by the surviving daughter of Sydney Gearing. Using that camera and the set of unexposed photographic postcard paper stock, I re-imagined and awakened the care home’s past by (re)creating a series of resident portraits with an Edwardian pop-up backdrop. I also explored the notion of myself as Gearing by empowering them to make a ‘portrait’ of me as him.
I collaborated with heritage photographic specialist, Tony Richards from The John Rylands Library, Manchester in the technical delivery of a pop-up Edwardian studio, recreating the photographic backdrop in Sydney’s portrait, and the printing of the postcard photographic material.
I produced five editioned boxsets of the portraits on the original ‘Gearing Archive’ Ilford Tonelle Bromide pre-Second World War postcard stock.
There was also enough post-war photographic paper in another box to print and exhibit these portraits as part of my wider research in the form of an installation at The Williamson Art Gallery where Sydney regularly visited, see Place on this website.
As the family did to me, I have gifted a boxset to them. I have donated one to the Williamson’s permanent collection (which holds photographs from the original Priestley Studio), one to Apple Blossom Court, one to my collaborator and one for my archive.
Each is packaged in one of Sydney’s original boxes.
