Faye Claridge Kern Baby

Warwickshire based artist Faye Claridge created an enigmatic new commission for the Park at Compton Verney which took on the striking form of a 5-meter high corn dolly entitled Kern Baby. This extraordinary sculpture was also the centrepiece for a new photographic commission by Claridge inspired by the work of historic Birmingham based photographer Sir Benjamin Stone.

Faye’s work explores identity, photography and history, often using archives to look at how personal and national identity are based on ideas of tradition, customs, folklore or past events. Kern Baby has been inspired by photographic work of nineteenth-century photographer Sir Benjamin Stone, who travelled throughout Britain recording unusual festivals and customs. Faye was drawn to his photograph that depicts a ‘Kern Baby’ from a festival called ‘The Harvest Home’ in Northumberland in 1901. This festival was about the local community celebrating the corn (wheat) harvest, using the last corn that was gathered to create a human shape, dressed in fine clothes and called the ‘Kern Baby’ or ‘Harvest Queen’. The image has prompted Faye’s Kern Baby, which was her biggest commission to date, and which she hoped would stand at Compton Verney as an exaggerated sculptural emblem of folklore, resonating with the extensive British Folk Art collection housed inside the gallery.

The second part of the commission was inspired by another of Stone’s photographs that show the children of Whalton Northumberland standing around the Baal fire (a bonfire that was lit in midsummer on St Johns Eve). This haunting image led Faye to create an extraordinary new photograph involving local school children from Hampton Lucy C of E Primary School and Welcombe Hills School. Using the Kern Baby at Compton Verney’s as a prop for the children to encircle. This new photograph was the centrepiece of a display inside the gallery.

Faye said, “Compton Verney is the ideal location to show Kern Baby, as her historic, agricultural and folk roots all have strong connections there. She will stand tall in the park, weathering gently through the seasons, and will hopefully make everyone who sees her think about impressions of the past and the relevance of tradition in our present and future global lives. Creating her has been a fascinating journey into archives, photography and craft and I’m looking forward to seeing visitors being drawn to her giant, uncanny form in the landscape. She is the largest example to date of my theatrically orchestrated way of producing photographs and I hope she confronts expectation about what work with archive or documentary photography can be. She is a great example of how disguised or ‘faceless’ figures raise awareness of our most common and unconscious form of interaction and judgement-making and make us question how we relate to others (in the past and present).”