Due to the current lockdown restrictions, this exhibition has been postponed. We will announce further details in due course. 

Following the launch of their new Royal Albert Memorial Museum commission ‘ Any One May Come and Go’, Exeter Phoenix Associate Artists Preston Street Union present a bill-posted wall of paper prints that have also been distributed throughout Exeter and beyond in a contemporary act of trade and distribution. They invite anyone and everyone to endorse and display this collectively created poster, which is centred around the words ‘Anyone may come and go’, taken from Exeter’s annual Lammas Fair proclamation.

Earlier this year Preston Street Union worked with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, investigating the flow of people, artefacts and ideas that have enabled Exeter to prosper. Anyone may come and go is a new work resulting from collective research into the construction of tillet wrappers used in the city’s historic wool trade.

At the height of the wool industry, traders wrapped lengths of fabric for export in elaborate envelopes known as tillets. The tillets were decorated with ornate, specially commissioned prints, which acted as a branding device. While some of the sizeable wooden printing blocks used to make such prints can be seen in the RAMM collection, no known examples of complete tillets have survived, and so their construction and use is a matter of some speculation.