Output details

Net Form 2.

Two permanently sited objects for the Jerwood Gallery Hastings, UK.

The sculptures examine the implicitly kinetic nature of sculptural experience in which a moving viewer experiences a static object. Both were developed in partnership with the Jerwood Foundation, one of the UK’s most significant arts foundations and funding organisations. The gallery opened in March 2012, was built to house an internationally significant collection by artists such as Stanley Spenser and Prunella Clough, and has hosted solo exhibitions of Gillian Ayres, William Scott and the Chapman Brothers. This research advances the understanding of autonomy in site-specific sculptural practice.

Research Rational

There has been extensive public sculptural intervention over recent decades, in which sculpture appears in a semi-detached form, underpinned by presumed artistic autonomy. By contrast, other sited works have questioned the status of the white-cube gallery and emphasised the contextual relation of ‘culture’ and ‘environment’. These two sculptures depart from this conventional sensitivity to topography or history to investigate whether sculpture’s routine claims of formal autonomy can be critiqued without the object losing legibility as a distinct entity.

Strategies Undertaken

The sculptures adopt contrasting attitudes towards the relationship of site and object, foregrounding the ancillary supports that sculpture relies on as generator of meaning. The fence is pure supplement/support, collaboratively conceived, and an integral, functional part of the building, questioning perceptions of autonomy through the curiously shifting effect of its varied intervals. Net Form 2 differs in its over-engineered fixing of the object, which holds it apart from the fabric of its environment. Bright orange, it hovers uncertainly above the courtyard floor, pinned in place by four massive bolts.