February is not the best time of year to be involved in an outdoor exhibition, however it is also not the moment to say ‘no’ to a wonderful opportunity to site a piece of work in a public space. Gallery No.32 is an artist-run initiative started during the Covid lockdown as a space for artists to show their work for free to a passing audience. The site is publicly accessible land near Bexley railway station in South East London. The directors, Megan Stuart and Kieran Idle describe themselves as providing “a safe space for artists to show their work for free. Encouraging participatory and site-specific exhibitions and community events. Artists can exhibit their work horizontally in an anti-elitist environment, bringing art to the day-to-day public eye.” This year’s Winter Sculpture Park is their second and involves 43 artists. It will open on 26th February and run until 30th April 2022. The artists were selected from an open call.
The piece I am showing is an iteration of my work Becoming Geology first shown online and then at UCA, Farnham in 2021. The expanse of level grassland is a hugely expanded site in comparison with the garden and courtyard settings for the previous iterations.
This time I was keen to do away with the pallet base and to secure each column directly to the ground. This would free up the spacing between them and allow them to appear to be growing out of the ground. I used the weeks prior to the final install at Bexley to experiment with using 20mm rebar as a ground anchor for each structure.
In the end I did a complete rebuild of the piece in the garden to test its stability, and then dismantled it and labelled each section so that rebuilding on site could be as quick as possible. It has to be able to withstand wind and the possibility of being tampered with. Luckily Axisweb offers very reasonably priced public liability insurance for artists. The install took 2 days, the first challenge being driving in the ground anchors. My piece was to be sited in the vast expanse of grassland that had previously been a landfill site in a disused gravel pit. The resonance of this with the references in the piece is a happy coincidence, but the practicalities of the fact meant that the anchors could only be driven in 55cm rather than the 70cm intended before hitting a layer of concrete below the soil. I had to try several different places to get all four far enough in. The configuration of the structures was always intended to be less constrained than in the previous sitings and to allow viewers to wander amongst them. The intention is that they appear to grow from the grassy surface like some kind of core sample of the layers beneath.
By the end of the day I had built all the base sections although the rebar was protruding further than hoped and presented a challenge for the following day. Completely exhausted and facing a two hour journey home, I had achieved what I had set for the day. Day two was one of high wind and driving rain leaving me soaked through by lunchtime. However it is working on the upper parts of the structures that brings the piece together, so that process was enough to keep me going.
The bleakness of this spot in London’s Green Belt with its remnants of an industrial as well as pastoral past, now used by dog walkers and littered with their droppings, feels right for this piece of work. It is about what we humans leave behind, buried or not.
Visit Gallery No.32 for more details. The opening event is on 26th February 12 – 5pm and the show runs until April 30th 2022. Follow link below.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/winter-sculpture-park-tickets-239393130297
Liz Clifford 