At the weekend I took a trip to Devon to see family. Whilst I was there I managed to squeeze in a visit to an exhibition. I headed to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (RAMM) to have a look around and see what was going on. There I discovered the wonderful Sculpting The Musuem by Michael Shaw, which is on until 13 November 2016.
Michael Shaw had created a huge inflatable sculpture within the museum, which passed through a doorway from one room into the next giving the impression that the work was bursting through the gallery walls and filling the space.
Made from orange and yellow material, the work created a warming atmospheric glow within the gallery. The size of the work in the gallery was an interesting play on scale with the sculpture seeming almost larger than the gallery itself, thereby bringing into focus the negative space around the work and changing the feel of the rooms in the gallery. I would however have really liked to be able to walk closer to the installation to better experience the spaces that were created.
The play on scale was what fascinated me most about the work and it is something that Julia and I have experimented with for our own work, for example in our Big Knitting piece, where we scaled up the concept of knitting to create an immersive installation. It is also a theme that we hope to develop further. Integral to this is the choice of materials to transform typically small-scale techniques into large scale unexpected outcomes. We often dedicate time to researching unexpected or large scale materials and testing the boundaries with these materials. This was apparent in Michael Shaw’s work and made for an immersive exhibition experience.
