BECKY SHAW

LAST CHRISTMAS

17 / 11 / 25 - 07 / 01 / 26

Last Christmas, is a solo exhibition by Becky Shaw, an artist, researcher and Professor in Fine Art Practice at Birmingham City University.

In Last Christmas, Becky brings together her interest in Christmas iconography, with work from a three-year interdisciplinary research project. Justheat explored people’s emotional, social and political connections to types of heating, and specifically how people experience the social and cultural changes that are often marked by, or result from, changes to our heating fuels. By bringing together works from Justheat and a focus on Christmas, Becky seeks to reflect on the problems of time, nostalgia, culture and our relationship to the future.

After listening to over fifty oral history interviews which capture communities’ (in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) experiences of heating change, Becky became particularly interested in the problem of energy ‘transition’. The standard way of talking about energy change is through eras- the age of coal became ‘the age of gas’ and our governments are now seeking to usher in the net zero age to address climate crisis. However, the representation of distinct eras does not fit with how we live our lives or experience change. Within periods of (energy) change there are people who resist, people who choose to combine methods of keeping warm, and people who get left behind through economics or geography. In addition, when we tell stories of the past, we do so through the lens of our present, and we ‘live’ with our histories. To explore this non-linear experience of time, Last Christmas brings together a series of deliberately rough animations that physically play with how ‘transition’- the movement from one point to another- happens. These diverse films are accompanied by a series of lenticular postcards that visitors are invited to pick up, to try to find the exact moment when the past becomes the present. These works are presented within the ‘stage set’ of a Christmas fireside, to invite us to think about how keeping warm is an invisible backdrop to our daily performances.

UK Christmas cards, and other festive merchandise have remarkably consistent imagery. They conjure a world of cottages enveloped in thick snow, with deer and robins staring between trees covered in twinkling frost. Amidst the snow are spiralling plumes of chimney smoke funnelled from roaring wood and coal fires inside. We don’t know if UK Christmases ever looked like this, but they certainly don’t look like most people’s UK Christmas now. Today there is no reliable Christmas snow covering, many of us live in urban locations, many of us live in flats, many of us don’t celebrate Christmas, and most of us heat our homes with central heating, gas or electric fires with a sprinkling of open fires burning permissible solid fuels. Around the Christmas card fires are deep garlands of holly and bows, presents and woolly slippers - an enduring image of plenty that is also at odds with many lives. Despite the gulf between dream and reality, these images are still pervasive and heartfelt. They conjure a yearning for something glowing and ineffable, a past of deep connections and shared experience. Other cultures have similar iconographies (for Christmas and other festivals) showing how the fireside and its representation may be often tied to national representations.

About the Artist

Becky Shaw makes live, collaborative artworks that examine the tension between individuals, environment, tools and social structures, often in institutions of 'public good' including healthcare, education, utilities and work. Following her creative practice PhD in 1998, which involved working with palliative care patients, Becky developed a series of collaborations in healthcare and with practitioners including water engineers, architects and social scientists. She is currently working with energy researchers to explore heating transition in Romania, Finland, Sweden and the UK (CHANSE fund, 2022), and with cultures of childhood researchers to explore children's experiences of institutions (AHRC 2018-2021), and exhibitions (2023-2026) with Manchester Art Gallery. Artworks have been commissioned by organisations including City of Calgary Water Services, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Age Concern, Guys and St Thomas Hospital and with arts organisations including Hayward Gallery, Walsall Art Gallery, Sainsbury Centre, Amstelveen Art Incentive Prize, Librarian Services,  Ar/Ge Kunst Bolzano, and Rezidența9 Bucharest. Becky has a long interest in learning communities, inside and outside of universities. This has included leading Sheffield Hallam University's art and design PhD programme (before moving to BCU in 2023), and co-leading art and architecture gallery Static, Liverpool, in the 2000s.

For more information images, or interview requests contact Becky Shaw:

@beckyshaw9990 | www.beckyshaw.net