Dr. Gregory Salter, Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Birmingham, has written an article about our 2023 exhibition, Ed Webb-Ingall’s ‘A Bedroom for Everyone’. Gregory’s research centres on art in Britain since 1945, particularly focussing on histories of gender, sexuality, migration, and ideas of home/ the domestic.
Drawing on the use of the archive and history in Ed’s work, Gregory’s speaks to the way in which ‘A Bedroom for Everyone’ draws parallels between the present-day housing crisis and housing struggles under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Parallels that feel particularly pertinent within the context of Birmingham given the City Council’s bankruptcy announcement late last year and the intensive regeneration plans in place for Digbeth and other areas in the city.
Despite the disheartening similarities between the present and the past featured in the work, which perhaps indicate a lack of change or progress, Gregory’s points to the way in which Ed’s work serves to generate and foster camaraderie, solidarity, and resistance. Illustrating how the world could be, and has been, different.
As Gregory writes: ‘This is art not as service provision, even as arts institutions have been increasingly compelled to frame their work in such terms by funders, but art as a space of demystification, mobilisation, and possibility.’