- Venue
- ADeC, Babylon Gallery
- Location
- East England
Helen Stratford’s ‘A Day with a Duck’ by invoking the arbitrary, random and seemingly misplaced to explore place suggests an alternative to urban planning predicated on a single trajectory of economic expansion in favour of the quotidienne, unacknowledged and idiosyncratic.
Ely, England’s smallest city and one deemed by a recent estate agent’s survey to offer the best quality of life in rural Britain, is like all towns beset by 21C planning dilemmas. It has grown exponentially over the past two decades, becoming a cheaper option than nearby Cambridge to live and a dormitory for London. However, the infrastructure has not kept pace and the expanses of faceless new, largely expensive housing have led to an increasingly socially, culturally and economically divided population.
Helen Stratford’s ‘A Day with a Duck’ live-art research project and exhibition, currently at the Babylon Gallery in Ely, provides an artist’s response to the Council’s recent masterplanning process. It brings insight not only to Ely as a city but more generically looks at how public space is articulated and shaped by the minutiae of daily habits, asks what counts as disputed territory and identifies where the lines of acceptability are drawn.
Helen, who combines her practice with the practicalities and theory of work as an architect has chosen to scrutinise the patterns of a patch of land on Ely’s Riverside. Anyone who knows the city will know that this is disputed territory – to the extent that flyers for a ‘live duck shoot’ , produced by the Ely-based members of Cambridge Super 8 Group, could well be welcomed with a sigh of relief that at last the resident colony of Muscovy ducks was to be culled. Ely’s wildfowl are either loved or hated. For many the birds bring innocent pleasure and a gentle touch of anarchy, slowing the traffic, producing prodigious numbers of chicks and messing where there should be no mess. Others see them as nothing more than a misplaced nuisance.
Since the summer Helen meticulously logged the mundane and the extraordinary of life on the Riverside: the resident doing a daily bird count from her window, the dog walker, the office worker …. She has drawn on the experiences of the ice cream vendor and boat yard owner, and worked with the volunteers who clear the abandoned and forgotten belongings (aka litter) from the Jubilee Gardens. The much-maligned ducks have provided her with a structure. One she followed for a day, interviewing people she met en route, whilst the single minded and daily journey from the Riverside to the Market Square of another, provided a diurnal timeframe.
Over the months a rhythm was distilled from these routines and presented as a series of careful tables and drawings, referencing the languages of ornothological observation or reminiscent of a pre-internet school textbook. Anomalous objects found in the regular clean up of the area have been listed and the track from the migrant salad pickers porta cabins on one margin to to the patch of woodland where the homeless pitch tents on the other mapped. The map of Ely itself has been transformed by the superimposition of key place names onto the anatomy of a duck as a ‘portmanteau’ image.
The gallery display included a table of documentary material – old photographs of shopfronts with wildfowl hung outside and the weekly graphs compiled by the local Muscovy Duck expert.
Apart from the distinctive combination of rigour and playfulness of Helen’s live-art and research, this exhibition is notable for its collaboration with both other artists and the public. Holly Rumble led one minute birdwatching sessions and Townley and Bradby orchestrated the random announcement of essentially dull activities, such as ‘about to eat an apple’ from the Jubilee Garden’s bandstand. Whilst Ely resident and artist Lyndall Phelps contributed the Ely Red Data book, playing on the threat of extinction of the Ely ducks.
