Having had some severe gales in the West country the art event sadly had to be cancelled for its second weekend. http://www.artecology.co.uk/page4.php?ImageGalleryPage=2 That's the unpredictability of nature!
Sunday afternoon I went to collect the remains of the clay work. I was surprised to see it was still very much in tact...it was no longer peaked as before...the centre had sunken slightly. The top surface had become a softened, plasticised form but beneath this some of the pellets were still very much in tact...in the sense of an ant hill...it served its purpose.
It was brought home in the large plastic box that the pellets had originally been taken up in.
I have been thinking of how I may take this further.
I have built a sculptural piece...images to follow (I left my camera usb lead at home so unable to upload images at this time...grrr!). Within this piece there is ......
'box, witness evidence, spade, counting cloth, typewriter.'
This is a new direction for me to take within my practice...the using of found/used objects within a documented way.
I have attached feedback from the Curator, Karen Pearson.
I have recently curated a group exhibition of 10 artist’s work set up as an art trail on a site managed by Natural England in South Devon. The artists were invited because of their current practice looking at the natural environment and our relationships and interventions with it. The event ‘Assemblage: narratives in a managed landscape’ was successful and well-received.
Mandy’s work was a very strong piece and a direct response to the location itself. She spent time both with the team that manage the site and on-site too. I was interested in how she chose to work with the very conspicuous and active ant colonies and her use of how the ants live and operate around the labour-intensive management of their space and lives. The use of the words gleaned from her research and visits and how they became something else but still of the site and that they took on the personalities and behaviours of the colonies were an integral part of the work. Mandy’s persistence and resilience in creating thousands of words needed to form a colony echoed the ant’s own qualities.
Although I curated the event, the artists were able to input their thoughts on where they preferred their work to go. I know that Mandy had some concerns about the location of the and whether the surroundings were detrimental to it. We also had some extreme weather that tested most of the exhibits. I felt that the siting of the work was successful; set back from the path but accessible to enable the interactive element of the piece. The audience engaged with the work collecting words and moving them into paths and piles; continuing the narratives of an ant colony. The weather accentuated the balance between the seen and unseen, the protected and protection that supports the work’s responsiveness to its subject.
