SPITALFIELDS PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME

Spitalfields Public Art 2007-08

This month sees the launch of five new installations commissioned as part of Spitalfields on-going commitment to supporting and showcasing the arts. The artists and works all have strong local connections and incorporate a wide range of mediums including sound pieces, projected images and sculpture.

These new stunning pieces of art will be on display from Thursday 20th September until June 2008.
>> Download Spitalfields Public Art Programme [PDF]

Spitalfields has an on-going commitment to supporting and showcasing the arts, through which it aims to celebrate the rich local history and ever-changing nature of the area. The visual art exhibitions have been curated by Dickson Russell Art Management and Free Form Arts Trust, as part of developer Hammerson's larger rolling programme of public art installations, events and exhibitions for the site.

A number of commissioned artworks and archaeological artefacts displayed within the site provide the permanent backdrop for the changing public art. This second exhibition of temporary site-specific artworks includes five installations by artists from Britain, Australia and America, each with strong local connections. The works, located in Market Street and on Bishops Square, take many varied forms, ranging from Kerry Andrews' sound piece audible in and around the Charnel House, which captures the history and context of Spitalfields using layered recordings; Craft and Pegg's relief map of the little known civil war defences in Spitalfields, overlain with projected images and located near Spittal Square; Simeon Nelson's responds to the architecture in Market Street using his own motifs, which derive from interior detailing in local Huguenot houses; David Rhys Jones' sculptural steel forms display enigmatic or thoughtful photographic images from Spitalfields, whilst providing a playful 'walk-though' route in Bishops Square. Eleonora Aguiari's bright red Church from Phase One, located at the entrance to Bishops' Square, has gradually become identified with the area and has been selected to remain on site.

It is hoped that these diverse works, which will be on display until June 2008, will be enjoyed by the many people who live, work and visit this unique area named Spitalfields.

As a post-script, a number of artworks from Phase One continue to enliven the public domain and have been re-sited at locations as diverse as The New Art Centre, near Salisbury, University of East London campus and St George's Hospital, Tooting.

1. Craft:Pegg

Paula Craft BArch MArch RIBA is an architect educated in the United States. Paula holds a BA in Architecture from the University of Florida and a Masters Degree in Architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design GSD. Paula is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of East London and director of the design practice craft:pegg

John Pegg BSc (Hons) MA MLA MLI holds a BSc in Geography from the University of Nottingham and Masters Degrees in Landscape Architecture from UCE and Harvard University GSD. John is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of East London and director of the design practice craft:pegg

Lines of Communication

The Civil War fortifications of London are a forgotten feature of the city's urban fabric. At the time they were one of the most extensive feats of civil engineering ever attempted in the British Isles. The eleven mile circuit of the city is recorded as a sketch in Vertue's map of 1738, a sketch of sufficient accuracy that it may be transposed onto the contemporary London map and its principle features located. Whilst a London-wide feature, the "Lines of Communication" as they were known possessed a number of significant features in and around Spitalfields including: Star Forts, Hornworks, palisaded ditches and moats. The construction of the Lines of Communication was a huge community endeavour, with reports of up to 100,000 citizens of all classes labouring voluntarily - and in good humour - to build the lines for their mutual protection.
Craft + Pegg use model making as a tool to understanding 'place'. To create the model the team had to critically analyse both the historic map and London's existing plan, and decisions and interpretations of scale and form had to be made in the production of new plans, the wooden positive, the rubber moulds and the finishing of the concrete model itself. The process of 'making' provides challenges which force an intimacy and familiarity that studying a plan can never bring.
The production of the model has been undertaken with a lot of hard work and advice from the following: Aito Albo, Julia Putsep, Ashley Bonham, Danny Cuervals and Mark Sowden.
In addition the work has been undertaken with the resources and infinite patience of the school of Architecture and Visual Arts at the University of East London.
www.craftpegg.com

2. David Rhys Jones

David lives and works in London, drawing inspiration from the city. His work is based on journeys or site-specific locations recorded using photographs and drawings; these are used to make sculptural, narrative work that reflects the experience of the journey. The work draws inspiration from Charles Baudelaire's concept of the 'flâneur', as a detached observer of the modern metropolis.
David Rhys Jones trained at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited widely, including the V&A Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Courtauld Institute.

Spitalfields Journey

This installation is directly inspired by a journey David made through Spitalfields, an area of London that has always been on the 'edge', geographically and socially. It has a rich, sometimes dark history, and still retains an 'aura'. The sculpture is constructed of steel with applied imagery, and is arranged as a two-part work that can be walked between and around, allowing the viewer to make their own journey. Walking between the two parts, one face has a mirrored surface to enable the viewer to be reflected and thus become part of the street scene. The images contained within the work have all been photographed locally but in selecting unusual angles and scale, and by juxtaposing unexpected details, the viewer is drawn into an enigmatic world.
www.davidrhysjones.com

3. Jane Hoodless

Anthropological curiosities, London's social history, personal identity and the relationship between fact and fantasy are predominant themes in Jane Hoodless' practice. Working in a variety of media including stone, plaster, cast metal, wax, papier mâché and textiles, she also creates site-specific workshops for heritage properties.
Discoveries in her historical research have made the inclusion of text increasingly prevalent in Jane's work, frequently combining factual information as surface decoration on the pieces she creates. Recently her practice has become more conceptual, drawing on skills she developed as a scriptwriter and magazine art director for both thematic and site-specific projects. Jane is currently developing a solo exhibition 'Containing the Collector' for Pittshanger Manor in Ealing, west London, that plays with the scale, structure and authenticity of a collection.

Belongings

London is a place where the outlandish and the spectacular are accepted at a glance and, as a result, fact and fantasy can become curiously entwined.
Spitalfields is unique in the wealth of cultural and historical clues that are still evident. The newly-developed and the long-neglected sit cheek-by-jowl. Everywhere you turn there is a half-story and you are left wanting more.
With this in mind, Jane has enabled relics of the past to become part of the present by recounting the lives of five people - real or imagined? - who lived and worked in Spitalfields over the last three centuries:
Mary Magdalene Crespigny - a Huguenot weaver's widowMatilda Clover - a Victorian fortune-tellerSolomon Smilansky - an East-European tailorSydney Crabb - a Cockney market porter Jalil Uddin - a Bengali restaurant manager
Jane has collated, curated and created the objects in Belongings to tell the stories of these people, using the fragments they left behind, set in the area that they lived. Displayed museum-like in vitrines in Market Street, objects, both found and made, and text provide tantalising glimpses of forgotten lives, where personal stories intersect momentarily with the broad sweep of history.
www.janehoodless.com

4. Kerry Andrews

Kerry is a visual artist and composer who has exhibited continuously since 1983 in Britain, Europe, the USA, Australia and China.
He works through various media, including drawing, digital media, installation, sound and music, to explore ideas about time and place. He is interested in the way we often migrate across mediums, and through different notions of time and place in our everyday lives and how these areas of translation or transformation are uncharted places of our awareness/consciousness.
Kerry is a visiting lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Shadow Rounds

The rhythm of the imagining community resembles a very slow dance…… But how can a symphony be created from the buzz of voices? … how can we progress from the murmur of the crowd to a chorus? … this requires time: …everything occurs within the obscure, invisible folds of the collective itself: the melodic line, the emotional tonality, the hidden intervals, the correspondences, the continuity that it weaves within the hearts of the individuals who compose it. Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence
Located in front of the Charnel House, Shadow Rounds is an electronic sound work exploring the voice of Spitalfields, a 'portrait' based on language transformations over the past 2,000 years, taking the layering of archeological remains and the [non]physicality of language as its two central metaphors. Tracing specific texts and vocalisations from the vicinity the work will explore audio snapshots of the area mapping the way the local place and language has been enriched by a steady influx of differing vocal rhythms and structures.
Layers of language over the centuries seep through to the contemporary fabric, adding to a collective intelligence, so the work aims to develop a notion of non-linear time rather than a simple progression of singular historical events.
The preliminary source texts include: British/Brythonic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Elizabethan English, French, Yiddish, Bengali, contemporary English.
Supported by the Arts Council of England.
www.kjandrews.co.uk

5. Simeon Nelson

Simeon Nelson works between sculpture, installation and public projects.
Since obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Art from Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney, Simeon has exhibited extensively in his native Australia and overseas. Recent shows include The National Gallery of Australia Sculpture Prize, 2005; The Jerwood Sculpture Prize, London, 2003; Tempered Ground, Museum of Garden History, London, 2004. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Royal Geographical Society, London and will have a major solo show at the RGS exhibition space in spring 2008.
Simeon has completed many major public art commissions and is currently working on projects in England and Australia, including Desiring Machine, a major new intervention for the outskirts of Melbourne; Floating World, a key commission for a new hospital in Birmingham; Cactal, University of Teeside; Proximities, for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and Flume, a large-scale site-specific commission for Ashford, Kent.
His work is included in numerous public and corporate collections both in the UK and overseas, including the Art/Omi Foundation, New York; The Jerwood Foundation, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK.
Passages, a monograph on his work was published by The University of New South Wales Press in 2000. Simeon currently holds a Readership in Sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire and lives in Whitechapel, London

Diaspora/Coalescence

Diaspora/Coalescence references the ornamental traces left by successive waves of immigrants in East London. Huguenots, Jews, Muslims and others have occupied the same spaces and transformed them to suit their own purposes and beliefs. The aesthetic systems that encoded these world views from the effusive French roccoco to abstract Islamic calligraphic geometries provide the aesthetic system for this work. The sinuous organic lines of Diaspora/Coalescence shift this notion of 'multi-aesthetic occupancy' to an examination of the problematic relationship between ornament and architecture after Modernism.
This sculptural intervention into Foster and Partners' development on Market Street sets up an opposition of formal elements. The elements which Simeon introduces to the columns and soffits of the street are extravagantly ornamental. They refer to a vestigial function of such ornaments - that of the corbel - the carved piece of stone that supported lintels or arches in the compressive structural logic of stone buildings.
www.simeonnelson.com

>> Download Spitalfields Public Art Programme [PDF]