CHURCH
WORK (4) : Dorchester
Abbey, Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
/ wire
Braided and knotted wire installation
developed from the Keyworth '50 Degrees North', suspended in the nave of
this huge Gothic church.
Dorchester Abbey is an extremely beautiful and inspirational place. I chose to site a suspended installation in the nave beside twin high windows; the interaction of the work with daylight and artificial light was important - the changing light changed its subject-matter. It was interesting to see how the piece responded to the cool northern light from the nave windows and the sun streaming through the windows in the West End..
It was made from over 4 kilometres of reflective silver plated copper jewellery wire, chosen for its colour and sparkle. It consisted of a number of large improvised woven and knotted wire drawings, assembled together and suspended from the nave rafters. The installation was light in weight and at times almost invisible; hovering overhead as people walked under it, seen or partly glimpsed from different locations within the vast building. It had a sense of delicacy, rhythms and tangles.
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"50 DEGREES NORTH" : Keyworth Centre foyer, London South Bank University, London SE1 / wire / 4-Apr-2005 ---
A suspended cube made from nets of stainless steel wire, which interacts with the assertive forms of its location while remaining separate delicate and even seemingly ephemeral. Its nets 'echo' the foyer's huge facade-grid and its woven lightness counterpoints the building's visual assertiveness. It responds to the changing light through the glass facade: in dull light it is seen only as grey wire; in sunshine the nets glitter with rainbow refractions and their knots sparkle like a rain of dew, while in the shadows cast by the mullions it vanishes - they project diagonally through it like bars of emptiness. At night it blazes in the atrium spot-lights like a firework frozen in the sky.
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"YELLOW-BLIND" : Area-10 Art Collective, Eagle Wharf, Peckham Square, London SE15 / plastic binding-tape, staples, paint, potted-pansies / Nov 2004
It started with finding a large roll of bright yellow plastic binding-tape. The tape was stapled into a huge net - within the limitations of this overall form the tape was allowed to lie as it wished . An existing door was smartened up and painted, in and out. In its external porch - set in the dreary yard facade - I made an orderly display of bought pansies.
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"BIRCH-CUBE" : Area-10 Art Collective, Eagle Wharf, Peckham Square, London SE15 / broken wood-slats, white-paint, wire / May 2004 to Sep 2004
A piece made in response to this huge abandoned timber-yard: scrapped wood-slats were broken, whitened, wired together into new lengths, and hung from a suspended frame beneath the roof-trusses, windows and infesting pidgeons. Daily, in this gloomy space, the turning sky-light briefly filled the cube with an intense lantern-glow of inner reflections.
The object was hung in two positions: near the ground like a swing, close to its shadows; and raised between the trusses and the floor.
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CHURCH WORK
(2) :
St George's, Ivychurch, Romney Marsh
/
tulle and monofilament
/
Sept 2003 to Mar 2005
The installation in St. George's Ivychurch is made from 200 metres of wedding tulle, torn into strips and joined with about 10,000 double-knots. Because of the nature of the tulle the strips clutch each other rather like the sticky wild weed which grabs you as you walk through undergrowth. I chose tulle for its transparency and associations with ceremony. I wanted this installation to lightly float above the nave like a dandelion clock or a swarm of mayflies, to appear to have just arrived in the rafters and settled there. I cannot hold on to the work - its short life reminds me that nothing is for ever ...
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CHURCH WORK (1) :
St Thomas More, Patcham, Sussex
/ porcelain clay / May 2003 to
Jun 2003
This is my second use of the unfired shrink-cracked remains of porcelain-clay weavings; originally made in 2001 for "Economist Carpet". This church 'carpet' was a response to the austere 1960s architecture & space design. In particular it extended the huge slatted window, complicating & completing its mediation of the dramatic conjunction of bright outer courtyard with the black-tiled floor.
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"ECONOMIST CARPET" :
Economist Building foyer, St James, London / porcelain clay
& lamp /
23 Oct 2001 to 11 Dec 2001
In July and Aug I wove porcelain-clay nets that dried and shrank, cracked and broke - what was left was what was used. The 'Carpet' - thousands of propped pieces of unfired clay, wandered around the L shaped foyer. It changed continually: yellowish in the night bulbs, in sun glaring white and black, in scattered daylight tinted pink and turquoise. At dusk a lamp beside its apex saturated its 'heart' with red, creating multiple reflections of 'ruins' / 'skyscrapers' in the glass walls - (although conceived long before, during its installation the Manhattan tragedy seeped into it!).
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