“To Make a Monument is a public artwork commissioned and produced in collaboration with Household that explores untold acts and histories of labour, care and maintenance; and the communities that form around them. Jan McCullough focuses on the forms associated with the pragmatic and incidental gestures of work and working environments and the inventive ways that people solve problems using mundane objects and structures. She employs materials and visual languages associated with these activities to create sculptural installations, interventions and photographs. Her starting point for this work is the National Museums Northern Ireland A.R. Hogg and R.J. Welch archive collection, which includes photographs commissioned from 1920s-40s that document the machines and wares produced in Belfast. To Make a Monument re-presents a selection of this overlooked archive, mostly viewed by researchers and archivists, back into the public. The images Jan has chosen include objects and details that acknowledge subtle acts of looking, staging, framing and making by invisible hands and eyes. Her installations around the Queen’s University campus publicly celebrate the presence and efforts of unseen workers. They consider how labour can be represented outside of the institution, figuratively and literally, by creating temporary monuments to the small, evocative gestures of ordinary people, the objects and goods they produced, and the everyday spaces where they worked.”