First, Build Your Summer House

After much deliberation, planning and anticipation our Summer House for the Green Patch project arrived on site and with the help of four fabulous volunteers, we spent our first day putting the structure together. From our corner of the Green Patch, beside the newly planted orchard we enjoyed the lay of the land, the heat of the sun, used power tools, cut roofing felt, made tea, hammered in tacks and painted on wood preservative.

Laying the base

Two walls and a floor

Two windows, two doors

Supporting the internal beam

Time to get the roof on and attach the felt before the predicted rain.

INTENZ at Corby Open

 

During March we took part in the first Corby Open Exhibition in the Old Library. Artist Phiona Richards has written a lively, comprehensive post describing how the exhibition came about which you can read here.  The Old Library is a wonderful space and there are many artists working towards making it a more permanent Gallery and Studio Spaces. We decided to enter a variation of our installation INTENZ called Conurbation which utilised the big triangles and three sets of smaller triangles.

INTENZ was originally created as part of our project Fingerprints on the Pew and in response to the architecture of St Peter and St Andrews Church in Beanfield Avenue, near our studios. It is a portable sculpture which can be moved and changed, creating many different permutations. INTENZ has already appeared at a number of sites in a variety of configurations.

Parents and children making sculptures

at the Boating Lake in Corby

During the Festival of Christmas trees 

at St Peter and St Andrews Church

 

At York Minster

Now we had a new venue, at the Corby Open, to arrange our adaptable sculpture. Setting up was quite eventful as we had been allocated a space to be shared with artists with films to project. It was a tight squeeze and took several hours to install but we were helped and encouraged by one of the exhibition volunteers, Nick, a landscape designer who completely understood and enjoyed the flexible nature of the sculpture and its exploration of space. Nick spent several hours with us, playing with the permutations of the sculpture's structural possibilities, and relating it to his own thoughts about garden structures.

We were just about to tackle the lighting when it was all change! The space was also going to be used for a poetry reading during the Private View and the other artists felt the installation would block the flow of people through the room. We were left in a bit of a quandary as we had been allocated the space and couldn't immediately see where we could move to.

After investigating other spaces and making a flurry of phone calls, we set about dismantling the installation, moving furniture and reassembling everything in a completely different configuration in another room! Again the space was quite tight, there was no room for people to interact with the sculpture as we had originally intended and there was definitely no flow through.

In many ways the space was challenging to use and the results not completely to our satisfaction, but we wanted to add our support to this new venture in the heart of Corby. We rose to the challenge, this being another opportunity to reconfigure the installation once more to fit yet another space!

We were able to set up some of our small lights 

and darken down the room to create some dramatic effects.

Ann Leonard, who originally saw INTENZ at St Peter and St Andrews, and came to Corby Open, said "Loved Miles & Dacombe's installation, it gains new dimensions whenever I see it."

Here are a pair of visitors who decided to turn on the main lights to see what was in the room! Carole was at the gallery that day and invited them to make their own sculptures with the smaller triangles.

Although it had proved challenging to install INTENZ at the Corby Open, we once more had some great interactions with people who saw the work and had a chance to interact with the structural shapes. All the elements of INTENZ are made in the same proportions, an irregular tetrahedron, in a variety of sizes, from the very tiny to the huge! It is constantly fascinating just how many structural inventions can be made from the same elements and it was great fun to give the installation another outing!

Miles & Dacombe plus INTENZ can be hired to help your
school, gallery or group explore space, light and sculpture.
Further details available upon request.

myth strata

More on Mythogeography...

Having thought about maps as visual representations showing us things that we cannot see, revealing connections and networks, mythogeography introduces the idea that each place is also an interweaving of myths, stories and histories, a network of meanings that cannot be seen but become part of the fabric of the place...

(Public art can be a way of making the meaning of a place visible.)

The threads that link a place to another place (or person connected to that place) are also part of this interweaving, overlaying of networks forming new nexus points, connecting stories, themes, imaginative responses...

These connections all exist in the imagination.  If made physical they might look like rock strata - building up layer upon layer over time to produce a rich fabric of meanings, compacted together to create the place that we now inhabit.

- oh!  and there's another word I must blog about!  I came across something the other day about the word "inhabit", the physical occupation of a space with one's body... I must look that up again, another blog post coming soon!

Mythogeography

"Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about and visiting places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single and restricted meaning (for example, heritage, tourist or leisure sites tend to be presented as just that, when they may also have been homes, jam factories, battlegrounds, lovers' lanes, farms, cemeteries and madhouses). Mythogeography emphasises the multiple nature of places and suggests multiple ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving those places and their multiple meanings."

Mythogeography website