Call Me exhibition

Jo Hamill, a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Teesside University, has been working on a new exhibition 'Call Me'.

Do you remember the days before smart phones, mobiles and even landlines, when private telephone conversations had to be conducted inside a public call box?

Perhaps you can recall a particular box, or the heavy dial and the struggle to push a coin into the meter before the beeps ceased? Who were you calling? How were you feeling? Were you alone or was there a queue of people waiting outside, party to your every word?

With their promise of privacy, public telephone boxes were all too often the sites of assignation or heartbreak. And yet what was really being said? Was it ever original?

Ellen Bell and Jo Hamill’s new installation Call Me, at Upper Settle’s now decommissioned telephone box and reincarnated as The Gallery on the Green, poses an elegant, yet whimsical response to this question. A written collage of notable literary telephone dialogues, Bell and Hamill’s transparent book-like structure plays with the notion of a line of communication that is sometimes clear and other times obscure.

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Find out more about the exhibition