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The new Supreme Court encourages visitors to the Court. Those who visit come away with a variety of impressions of the highest court in the land. In this guest post, artist Isobel Williams reflects on her latest visit to the Court.
You can watch the court action on adjacent monitors
in the basement.
Counsel has two default positions
Today’s hearing is veiled in white. Vestergaard Frandsen A/S and 2 others v Bestnet Europe Limited and 5 others concerns insecticidal mosquito nets.
Have trade secrets been misused? Must someone with an obligation of confidence know that an act complained of breaches that obligation?
Court 2 window blind. The direction of the
curves in the composition shows you
I am left-handed
Fittingly we’re in Court 2, the white-painted box, which brightens the eye and sharpens the mind.
The justices are needling counsel. Every argument is dutifully brought out for inspection in the sunlight which filters through off-white flower-embossed blinds.
Counsel moves around a lot but doesn’t ward off the occasional painful bite from the cloud of justices:
‘It doesn’t really help with the point we’re on at all.’
‘As such, no, my lord.’
‘As such.’
Then, after under two hours, proceedings are brought briskly to a close: the court decides not to hear the respondents.
I wander along to the basement café. Sun streams down from the roof-window several floors above and bounces off the shiny white tables.
Such brightness demands a melancholy thought: The White Duck, an eighteenth-century meditation on white on white painted by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. (Make that white on cream on gold on silver on grey on honey on brown, and a chorus of textures.)
Melancholy because this rhapsodic still life was stolen from us all in 1992, from Houghton Hall in Norfolk, taken out of its frame. Does it have a loving curator? Is it rolled up and cracked? Can it hear rats? Will it be recovered before its keepers forget where it is, or die?
There is no sitting this afternoon so I make my own entertainment.
In the basement gallery there are two white marble bears, the gift of the Chief Justice of Canada, set under a glass table-top. They are a source of atavistic confusion to the Supreme Court’s own souvenir bear who peers in from above.
Then, in full sight of The Queen, he decides to cover everything with billows of white.
