DEN (Sculptures you can hide in)
South London Gallery 2016.
I worked in the Clore Studio at South London Gallery for a month. Each Sunday the studio was open to the public. Young people from local communities and visiting families worked with me to build dens. The materials provided were explicitly sculptural; shapes cut into foam, bamboo, sheets of transparent colour, bright fabrics, geometric cardboard shapes etc. So the invitation was ‘to build a den’ but the activity by stealth was contemporary sculpture.
This is some text written for the workshops.
I’m interested in what people are expected to do/expect to do in a gallery space. I’ve been thinking about when artworks are ‘active’, how people might build a sculpture that they can inhabit and how a sculpture’s primary function could be as a catalyst for activity, play or retreat. I also like the idea of just building stuff, quickly, without being precious, seeing what can be done and recording what seems to work.
The sculptures or dens produced during these workshops will be ‘sculptures to hide in’.
Self-built spaces of retreat and privacy. They will be fleeting objects recorded through drawing and photography and might well become blueprints for future sculptural artworks.
