Despite Bracknell’s close proximity to London, it is perhaps not known as being a cultured town. However unsuspecting shoppers this month can’t have failed to notice the town centre being overrun by art. It seemed every second shop window had something strange and colourful to display but oddly enough not to sell, as the ReOrsa art walk and exhibition took over downtown Bracknell.
Now if shoppers hadn’t already heard of the art walk I’d put money on many of them halting and having a look at one piece in particular. From Barbara Cotterell’s window, located quite far along Broadway, stares out plastic unseeing eyes. In fact not even plastic eyes look out as this tiny cow sculpture, made from Organic Milk cartons has no eyes, rather hollow bottle openings where eyes should glare. Despite the twee subject matter there is a lesson being taught here. In an artist’s statement Cotterell declares “I want to raise awareness of our personal and collective responsibility and impact upon our environment”.[i] The lesson here being, re-cycle, presumably to save the future for ourselves and for the sculptures more lifelike kin.
Another window trying to make us think about our waste is put together by Jennifer Leach. Now the actual aesthetics of this work are not on first inspection pleasant. The installation titled “A Month in the City” is made up of fruits and vegetables hanging in front of a bleached, white background. However as you can guess the effect of being left behind a glass front has had a detrimental effect on the produce. The work itself is rather stomach churning to look upon, unless as pointed out by Leach in her online blog http://www.onemonthinthecity.com/ you look very closely at the individual pieces. At this point you see the startling colours created by the usually avoided fermentation process. This brings me onto the real gem of this work, the blog. After all this idea has been done before, many times have artists left various fruits, flowers or in extreme cases meat, in the gallery to decompose in their own sweet yet smelly time. However Leach has reached out to the viewer to become included in the work by sending photographs of the changing fruit to her via her email. This takes some of the control back to the viewer, as we do not get the usual interaction one gets with such pieces when they’re in a gallery setting. i.e. the smell. It also offers some beautiful writing and description, as well as a rather worrying realisation of the lack of involvement by local businesses. Therefore the blog set up by Leach offers a good extension of the work and actually some might say the writing and observations of the blog are more poetic than the work itself.
Either way it was another successful year for ReOrsa and a successful attack by art on the town centre of Bracknell.
[i] http://www.materialspace.com/page5.htm
