Mile End Ancestors 27 July - 15 August 2009 English Heritage Outreach Mile End Ancestors, an exhibition of art works that celebrate or commemorate an ancestor. All of the contributing artists either live in or were born in Mile End, or have a strong connection to the area. The works focus on family members who were all born, lived and worked in Mile End and Bow from around 1873 to 1950.The work takes the form of 4 portrait images. My Great Grandmother, Martha Ann Markham (Later Lancaster), Great Grandfather Frederick Lancaster, my Grandfather Earnest Augustus Warren and my Grandmother Ellen May Lancaster (later Warren). These are interpreted as 4 colour plates from a fictitious book publication. Although largely fabricated, the plate images are so designed as to represent pages taken from a real book, Anne Beasants ‘Thought Forms’, first published in 1901. Annie Beasants involvement with the Mile End Match Factory where my grandmother worked as a young woman. The third is a personal preoccupation with the Theosophical movement, of which Annie Beasant was a prominent member. Annie Wood Besant as well as being a Theosophist, women's rightsactivist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self rule, fought for many social causes, starting with freedom of thought, women's rights, secularismbirth control, Fabian socialism and workers' rights and as such is a figure worth remembering.Her publication ‘Thought Forms’, of which this work takes it’s reference, is a study on the nature and power of thoughts. By presenting these family members in this way I hope to create an enigmatic and spiritually potent image, lifting the individual from the everyday, prosaic interpretation. I also aim at a suggestion of numinous resonance, an invocation of the ’astral’ presence of the person from an angelic realm perhaps. The link to Beasant is one also that will focus on the work of a somewhat neglected figure in British social history. Much of the research and photographic sourcing for this project has been made possible due to the archiving of family photographs, documents collated by my Mother Patricia Kilburn (maiden name Warren). These include a number of journals that had been written by my Grandmother Ellen May Lancaster (later Warren), which detail much of her early life growing up in the East End.