Output details

Plot 16: the Fermenting Room

The main focus of the work explored the artists ongoing research questions focused on ‘location’ and ‘site’. To walk onto a communal area of land, to research, make, build and plant a work over two years, to hold dialogue with local people and to shape a meaning in relation to lived and shared experience over time, in relation to the seasons, questions our sense of place, our interconnectedness and our impact on each other. Works in public spaces challenge the commissioners, the artists and the public’s idea of ownership. The public are participants and audience, they are part of the complex layering that underpins the work with meaning as much as shaping its final reading. brook & black have undertaken several temporary and permanent public artworks, where the determinants of the work move between the site alone and sometimes in consultation with the local community. For this commission, the artists brief was to challenge and facilitate a dialogue in relation to contemporary practice where one would probably not otherwise have taken place. This immediately positioned the artists as outsiders, but also as having to immerse and be part of a location/community that would possibly not welcome such an intervention, by their presence or their artwork. This activity, which resulted in the making of a work that layered the history of Modern Art Oxford in its architectural form, into a new location, and also mimicked (as growers of a hop crop) to some extent the activity of the residents (the allottees) enabled the artists to align themselves, yet remain apart from the ‘host community’.

brook & black are a collaborative partnership who share equally the intellectual and practical aspects of their research-led artistic practice.