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BACK to FRONT

BACK to FRONT is a series of Fine Art installations ‘Back to Front Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’ built in Cottell’s home in Greenwich as temporary exhibitions. They follow from earlier house projects, ‘Display’ completed in 2001; ‘Still Live’ 2003/4, ‘Collecting Time: The Living and the Dead’ 2005/6.

The installations, which were all organized and promoted as offsite exhibitions by Café Gallery Projects London, introduce architectural and sculptural interventions within interior space. They present the domestic interior with its contents as a site for interaction between the visitors to the installation and residents of the home. The relative status/power of visitors and residents was factored into the design of the structures. In parallel, documentary projects were trialled with curators on how to display domestic life within the art institution. In disrupting the norms of home/gallery, woman/artist, domestic/public and offering a different vision of how one might view or pass through a house, Cottell sought to enhance the perceptions of visitors and offer them an alternative to the everyday reality around them. The visitor was then able to think differently in the presence of others.

An e-book, ‘House: From Display to Back to Front’ published in 2013, includes extensive documentation of Cottell’s process and methods and collated responses from visitors. It was published in Epub format for ipad, ibooks and Amazon Kindle. It was distributed by KT Press and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, New York. An essay by Dr Katy Deepwell is included.