This publication was produced on the occasion of the solo exhibition The Temperament Index, at Aspex Portsmouth, 2024, the latest iteration of Melanie Jackson’s travelling project Spekyng Rybawdy.

In her installation, the viewer is invited to wander amongst projected animations, cut-out figures and body bits, handmade clay objects, drawings and more. Jackson has rallied together a procession, a carnival of conceptual nomads that jostle and jive, pleasure, fight and take flight across a trans-historical plane of existence, in which we are as much participants as voyeurs.

Pilgrim Badges were small cast tin or lead alloy brooches that were mass-produced in the medieval period and sold along pilgrim routes, and at fairs and carnivals. A group of these were known as the bawdy badges, the secular badges, the sexual badges, or the erotic pins and have been found across Europe in their thousands. Easily affordable, made by and for working people, they were part of a vast and profitable pan-european culture .Using the badges a kind of collective commons from which to add in the present, Jackson draws out themes of their persistence, locomotion, and motility, farcical assemblages, dissolutions and transformations of gender and class. It is a world of absurd and inventive beings, rich with humour, dissent, subversion, delight, hilarity, titillation, and surprise. 

The Temperament Index’s publication combines images from the project with texts by Melanie Jackson, Thomas Groves, Hettie Judah, and Ricardo Reverón Blanco.

Stickers produced by the artist will be sent alongside the publication.

Spekyng Rybawdy will tour to Phoenix, Exeter in 2025.