Output details

Make a Piano in Spain

“sit in the sun and relax” and “trampoline or pole vault” were among answers to the question ‘what do you do to make yourself feel better?’ collected from 500 members of the public in the Euston Road as part of ‘Make a Piano in Spain’, commissioned by the Wellcome collection in 2008 (ppt:2-7). As well as these answers the work generated a publication (ppt:4) and an installation and public reading in the Wellcome Collection.

This work is a prominent example of the theme of ‘place and wellbeing’ in Newling’s work. As a sculptor, location is a defining feature of Newling’s practice, evident in projects since 2008 through the direct involvement of members of the public, in particular locations. Engaging with the issue of ‘wellbeing’, has led him to develop a project that has clear relationships to the theme of belief present in his work related to devotional contexts and practices in his previous work as well as the ‘placement’ of the texts that form the ground of his work directed at ideas of nature (see output 1). It drew from previous work such as ‘Preston Market Mystery’ (ppt:9&10), and coincided with smaller scale works such as ‘Root Zone’ and ‘Local History’, 2011 (ppt:11-16).

Here, however, the enquiry centres on both the subjective experience of participants and their location as the setting for the work. It is possible to align its engagement with everyday experience, and individuals’ efforts to transcend the pressures that come with it, with a tradition that can be traced back to the Russian Formalists’ critique of the everyday through the Situationists and Fluxus. Newling’s contribution to this debate through this work is to distil a particular and contemporary sense of this transcendence.