Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan introduce their work for Art Across The City 2012
We have designed a pair of shelters for the gardens in front of Swansea Museum. The shelters are simple temporary constructions with no seating and are lit only through the aperture created by the cut out mouth of a cartoon face. They are painted with a “found” pattern of rainbow coloured stripes. It’s a pattern with a number of possible allusions, including LGBT Pride and the peace flags of anti-war protests.
The simple hand drawn face used on the shelters is a recurring motif within our work. This work is one of a series of similar such pieces that function by creating disjunctions and disruptions in relation to their contexts. The cut out faces act to shift the status and nature of the work and a viewer’s relationship to it, with the objects functioning more as a theatrical stage set, rather than as sculptural objects.
