Elephant in the Room
The Elephant in the Room was a 2017 Hull City of Culture legacy project featuring giant cardboard elephant sculptures by Laurance Vallièrres. The exhibition aimed to raise awareness about homelessness in Hull, highlighting the city's need for social justice alongside cultural celebration.
The Elephant in the Room was a Legacy Project as part of the Hull City of Culture festival in 2017. The festival ran over 10 months, and raised more than £32m of investment to put on about 3,000 events seen by more than five million people with 95% of local residents attending at least one event.
Featuring International Street Sculptor, Laurence Vallières of Quebec, who is renowned for her giant sculptures of wild animals made from discarded and recycled cardboard. For Laurence, the metaphor of cardboard as an art material refers to its disposability and utility in everyday life. In a similar fashion, our attitude as a society towards the animal kingdom has been to see and use animals as a usable commodity to suit our human needs. From trophies on walls to the food chain, animals are merely used and discarded.
For Hull and their City of Culture Legacy, Art of Protest collaborated with Laurence Vallièrres to take over an empty high street shop for a week. The aim of the free exhibition was to call attention to one of Hull’s most intractable social issues – homelessness. Leading into The City of Culture celebration, the level of recorded homeless people in Hull was doubling year-on -year. Art of Protest, in conjunction with commissioners Hudgell Solicitors, felt that alongside the celebrations and placemaking that comes with such a cultural occasion, there was also a time and place to think about what some of the benefits that ought to emerge for improving the cultural capital of a city. More visitors, more business investment, more vibrant city centres, more engaged young artists: these are all fantastic dividends that should be pursued as a result of any such a high profile event that helps define a City of Culture. But at the same time, the richness of a city’s culture is only as bankable as its ability to also deliver social justice. Put quite bluntly, citizens sleeping rough in the doorway of its museums is not a good advertisement for any city’s cultural offering.
As curators and producers of the exhibition, Art of Protest encouraged Laurence to take a spin on her signature style and incorporate massive cardboard sculptures of a family of elephants. Again, the metaphor of cardboard was a strong message and theme for the installation as it is the preferred material for the homeless to sleep rough on. And slightly more subversively, it also suggested that perhaps we also see homeless people as easily disposable materials. It was a thought provoking and powerful moment for Hull and one which at least held some feet to the fire in acknowledging the challenges every city has in engaging all its communities for a better life. Sponsored and commissioned by Local business, Hudgell Solicitors, the show was used as a platform to announce three new partnerships with UK Charities to tackle the issue of homelessness and its causes at the sharp end of the city.
