At the core of The Beast is an animated short film, a morality tale, centred on the story and legacy of iconic Scottish/American steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and his namesake Diplodocus carnegii. Fossils of Diplodocus carnegii were first found in Wyoming in 1899 on an expedition financed by Carnegie. He subsequently had the species named after himself and commissioned a team of Italian artisans to cast seven replica skeletons in plaster. These objects were donated to international museums between 1908-1913, as a ‘peace keeping exercise’, an act which first brought dinosaurs into popular public consciousness.

Co-written with Ian Saville the story imagines a conversation between Carnegie and a Diplodocus carnegii, that picks at the true nature of his philanthropy. The animation was voiced by Dave Anderson and Keeley Forsyth. Inspired by the aesthetics of the American political satire magazine Puck, the animation was by Regina Ohak with additional effects by Duncan Marquiss with sound and music by Ross Downes.

A collection of archival material relating to Carnegie along with specimens from the University of Edinburgh’s Cockburn Geological Museum including rocks and minerals associated with steel production alongside a fossil of an ichthyosaur were presented in the display cases.

The Beast was commissioned by Collective with funding and support from the University of Edinburgh Art Collection.

It’s Not Too Late to Change is a partner work to Ewan’s decimal clock We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be and continues the lyrics of the song from the 1976 film Bugsy Malone. The oversized calendar, which gallery staff change daily throughout the course of the exhibition, follows the structure of the French Republican Calendar where the year is made up of twelve months of thirty days. Each month is divided into three weeks, each week is ten days long. The final five (or six) days of the year are festival days, named after the ideas; virtue, talent, labour, conviction, honour and revolution.

Designed in collaboration with Sam Blunden and Dan Griffiths.

How Many Flowers Make the Spring? is an immersive installation which gathers together organic material—living and dried plants, grasses weeds, moss, soil and seed heads—to create a meadow-like landscape indoors. Within the landscape voices can be heard; oral histories and personal testimonies, where individuals recall moments where they have been involved in direct action. Through weaving together individual recollections of different political events the voices collectively slip through time and place to suggest a moment of greater social transcendence has taken place.

I knew a man who nothing could dismay
Or take away his dignity
A man who knew, what two and two made and how Many flowers make the spring

‘Winter Turns to Spring’ – Robb Johnston

Recorded with five activists during lockdown in 2021, the original interviews recall events spanning a 60 year period in the UK including anti-Vietnam war protests, anti-fascist marches, anti-racist events, the anti-nuclear movement, the women’s movement, environmental actions and anti- immigration enforcement protests. The participants recall their position in these moments as social workers, writers, architects, singers, graphic designers and citizens, with a tenacity to not only imagine, but to fight for another possible world.

Featuring the voices of: Ali, Tayo Aluko, Frankie, Henry Bell, Roger Huddle and Robb Johnston.

The Republican calendar was adopted by the Convention in 1793, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to replace the Gregorian calendar. Embodying and carrying the Republican ideals directly into the life of every citizen, it was in use for twelve years. It completed the dismantling of the Ancien Régime by reorganising time itself.

According to the idea that with the advent of the Revolution,‘time opens a new book to history’, the weeks and months of the year were restructured by a parliamentary commission comprised of artists, poets, scientists and horticulturists, among whom D’Églantine and the mathematician Gilbert Romme. The days of the week and the seasons were renamed in order to evoke nature and agricultural life, and the names of the months each referred to one aspect of French climate (e.g. Brumaire, from the French word for ‘mist’, or Pluviôse, for ‘rain’) or an important moment in peasant life (e.g. Vendémiaire, referring to the grape harvest, or Germinal, for ‘germination’). Replacing the Saints of the traditional calendar, each day was furthermore named after an agricultural product, a plant, a mineral, an animal or a tool.

Virtue

Mothers’ Meeting (We Are the Ones Who Make Up for the Losses at War)

These were the words written on the banners held up by pregnant women who followed the processions accompanying the plantation of liberty trees in post-revolutionary France. The country, then at war with Austria, was seized by patriotic fervour and keen to defend the achievements of the Revolution. This is when the tree, an ancestral symbol of fertility, also became a strong image for the revolutionary ideal.

Mothers’ Meeting is a collection of nursing chairs from different periods, on which visitors are invited to sit. Nursing chairs are one of the only pieces of domestic furniture to have been designed specifically to fit the proportions and function of the female body. They were used for breastfeeding, their low seating encouraging interaction with children. This type of chair was mainly found in upper-class homes, which typically employed wet nurses to feed their babies, a common practice up until the 20^th century.

The title of this work refers to the largely invisible history of women in the Revolution and to the unacknowledged emotional and physical labour of mothers, which the artist associates with the notion of Virtue. The chairs are arranged in a circle, subverting their original purpose and encouraging women to congregate, speak and be publicly visible.

Talent

Female Sword Swallowers Moon Calendar by MisSa Blue

The idea of Talent is embodied by a collection of swords created by the female sword swallower MisSa Blue, one of the leading figures of the contemporary Sideshow and Neo-Burlesque scene.

After a life threatening accident during one of her performances, MisSa Blue designed and commissioned a complete set of swords to be used on different days of her menstrual cycle. (The oesophagus and the uterus swell on the first day of menstruation, which is what caused the injury.)

The set includes 28 swords of different lengths that follow the lunar calendar. Two swords appear only once in the set: a bladeless sword resembling the new moon, and the longest sword, which corresponds to the full moon. The longest sword is to be swallowed on ovulation day when the female body is blooming and no sword should be swallowed on the first day of menstruation as it is the most dangerous day for a female sword swallower to get hurt.

This piece was originally commissioned to tour with the show Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman in the UK.

Labour

We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be
Decimal analogue clock, 2011

The concept of Labour is materialised by a decimal clock whose dial displays ten instead of twelve hours. The decimal regulation echoes the historic attempt to redefine and rationalise the day. Concurrent to the Republican calendar, France introduced a new system of time measurement liberated from the monarchy and Christianity, and temporarily lived to the rhythm of the decimal second. In decimal time, the day is divided into ten periods rather than twenty-four. Midnight becomes ten o’clock, midday becomes five o’clock, each new hour contains one hundred minutes, and each new minute contains one hundred seconds.

Ewan’s decimal clock recalls the historic function of the building that houses the CAPC, a colonial warehouse built in 1824 and used for over a century to store coffee, vanilla, sugar, cocoa, cotton, indigo, rum, wine, cereals, cod, dried fruits, spices etc. An archival photograph from the 1950s shows a clock overlooking the nave, defining the workers’ day. Ewan’s decimal clock replaces the one seen in the picture.

Revolution

Anti-Rota Fortunæ (No More Acceptance of Fate)
Painted wood with inlay, 2019

According to Silvia Federici, a scholar, teacher and activist who wrote about the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation), the image of the wheel of fortune appeared in medieval Europe during periods of social upheaval. A simple painted wooden construction, the ‘anti- wheel of fortune’ designed by Ewan to embody the 366^th day of the year – the day of Revolution in leap years – celebrates the concept of equality so dear to the Republicans. It bears the inscription ALL EQUAL BY NATURE.

What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our country must be strong
It's always right and never wrong
Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school

From ‘What did you learn in school today?’ Tom Paxton, featured in the section Young People and Education, from A Jukebox of People Trying the Change the World.

Silent Agitator was originally commissioned by High Line, New York, 2019 and has been shown since as part of Sculpture in the City, London, 2021 and at Collective, Edinburgh, 2022.

There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? was an evening of political song featuring vocal and choral performances to coincide with Ruth Ewan’s High Line commission Silent Agitator. Installed on the High Line at 24th Street, Ewan’s commission was a giant clock based on an illustration originally produced for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labour union by the North American writer and labour activist Ralph Chaplin that reads “What time is it? Time to organize!”

Chaplin composed many of the galvanising songs for the labor movement of the early 20th century, including the famous “Solidarity Forever” for the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek coal miner strike of 1912 in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Celebration and song have always played key roles in the efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World, which has come to be known as the “singing union.”

Building on this history, the performers in There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you? use music to relieve the fatigue of organising and celebrate labor rights victories, activists, and historical movements. For this event, Tayo Aluko performed excerpts from his one-person show, Call Mr. Robeson, about the life and times of the singer and activist Paul Robeson; the Sing in Solidarity Chorus sung a selection of their original choral arrangements for lyrics from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook; Lynn Marie Smith brought her energetic covers of pop songs recast with labor organising lyrics; NYC Labor Chorus performed selections from their repertoire developed over the last 28 years of singing together; and Brooklyn Women’s Chorus sung works including “We Were There” that speak to the central role of women in labor organising. Morgan Bassichis hosted the evening. Additionally, there was silk-screening of IWW graphics available on-site, provided by Shoestring Press.

In 2003 Ewan produced the first version of ‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World’ an ongoing archive of music with a broadly left-wing, political agenda presented on a CD jukebox. In 2018 she expanded the Feminist section of the project and presented the collection of 800 songs in a wall mounted jukebox. 

In this exhibition the Jukebox was accompanied by a series of found posters produced in the early 1980s as ‘Aids for Ending Sexism in Schools’. These champion female pioneers and campaigners for gender equality. Ewan added a new layer to these, inviting her five-year-old daughter to draw over the glass sheets, partially obscuring them. These works follow previous pedagogical experiments where Ewan produced drawings in collaboration with young children.