Public Realm Commission 2013 – Anne Deeming

Anne has been busy in her studio trialling and refining her sculptural objects, as well as scouting out a number of potential ‘sites’ to locate them. We asked Anne to shed some light on her research processes and starting point for I didn’t see you there and how thinking about work for the public realm has related to her usual way of working:

Anne: My research for the project has begun in a way that is very natural to me – walking around the city, familiarising myself with both the environment and the objects that already exist in those spaces. I was thinking about why other people walk around a city, about routes that were habitual ones, and it occurred to me that there would be well used “commuter routes” that pedestrians would use in Bristol, to get from Temple Meads to their place of work. With this as an idea I spent several mornings following crowds of people from the station, to see which streets were most walked, which, fairly obviously were the ones that led most directly into town and local offices. Once I knew where to concentrate my explorations I began taking photos.

My reference points for work are usually photographs – taken of things I see on the street – litter, recycling, abandoned furniture, any item that resonates in some way. I take photos on a daily basis, and have a catalogue of hundreds of images to drawn on. With the public space in mind for the finished works it made sense to record the accidental, the lost, misplaced, displaced items and street furniture, objects that are permanently in place.

Using my photographs of found objects, I have begun to digest and work these references into new hybrid objects, pulling in attributes from other systems within buildings, such as switches, handles, thermostats; the points of interface between a person and architecture, and other pre-existing utilitarian commodities. This process has been in tandem with choosing materials that the final works will be constructed out of – some objects more easily lend themselves to a certain material. I will predominately be using casting as a method to make the works for a number of reasons; I need many identical looking items for multiple sites, and I require a fast, economical way of doing this in a relatively short space of time.

What will be particularly important and exciting about I didn’t see you there is the element of ‘encounter’; how people discover and negotiate Anne’s works, which will be dotted around a number of locations in central Bristol. More will be revealed soon…

We’ll be using this blog over the next few months to share progress and document Anne’s project I didn’t see you there as it develops, including Anne’s making processes, Hand in Glove’s role as co-producers and the delivery of the project in the public realm of Bristol in June 2013.

Here, Anne talks about her practice and initial ambitions for the project.

Anne: I’ve recently graduated from an MA at Bath Spa and over the past 2 years I have been producing a body of work that focusses on the making of objects that look useable and recognisable in some way – and yet are not. As amalgamations of already commercially produced commodities, my works examine the role that expectation and memory plays in our reading and understanding of the objects we encounter, and articulate our often subconscious relationships with the items we surround ourselves with.

The objects I make are predominately human in scale, and they conjure multiple associations with things domestic and industrial, useful and useless, familiar and foreign. Their material and manufacture suggests a contradictory notion of being both mass-produced and individually crafted, and although often created to excess, it is important to me that they are hand finished, contain small variations, are each unique.

I’m interested to see how the objects I make might respond to being sited outside, in non art, non “coded” spaces. How they could increase the viewer’s awareness of their own routines, habits, and their own passage through a city by making them more aware the details of their surroundings. By coming across art objects in sites that usually hold the objects of least cultural value or recognition the viewer would perhaps more actively engage with looking, appreciating the tiny details of the fabric of the urban environment.