They laugh at me and my life, my life as a duck, but I don’t get worked up, it’d my life… as a duck.
Last month I was accepted for an exhibition taking place called SNIP, the exhibition is in conjunction with SNAP festival held at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh. SNAP takes place alongside the Aldeburgh music festival and features internationally known artists who explore a theme each year. This year the Aldeburgh festival is celebrating the centenary of Benjamin Britten and this is the basis for the work taking place at SNAP this year. UCS has managed to acquire a listed barn just down the road from SNAP where it will hold its own art exhibition, SNIP. Proposals for the exhibition were open to all year groups with a similar theme of the centenary of Britten being used in the brief. Below is my initial proposal for SNIP.
I would like to explore the area of ground outside of the barn. As you drive up the dirt track you are greeted with the large barn on your left, the grass covered ground outside and around the barn is where I propose my ideas will occupy. I have two main ideas for this space, both taking the notes from the opening prologue of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes and displaying them on the grounds in front of the barn.
My current studio practice consists of casting concrete; my choice for working with this material is to address its use in modern day construction, where once true care and time were taken in constructing buildings out of hand tools and timber, those processes have now been replaced with large scale castings out of concrete for speed and ease of completion.
My first proposal is to cast the repeated three bass notes that introduce the Peter Grimes opera, the three notes are repeated three times so as people arrive at the barn they will be greeted by nine concrete bass notes arranged standing on the grassy areas outside the barn. I see these notes as an introduction to the SNIP show, just as they are used in the opening scene of the opera, in a deep hard concrete, like the deep bass notes they are sung in. I feel the juxtaposition of the harsh concrete with the hand carved wooden barn will address our advances in construction over the centuries and also acknowledge Benjamin Britten’s work.
My second proposal is also to cast notes into concrete but instead of having the individual notes as the casting, I will be casting a large block of concrete that will mirror a piece of sheet music, taking the notes and using their outline to create a negative space, allowing light to shine through the music note holes. This can be placed and secured within close distance of an entrance door to the barn and be viewed from both inside and out, allowing the light from outside to burst through the music note voids and shine through into the barn. It will explore the space around the barn as well as impacting the inside of the barn too, from a viewer’s perspective. It still addresses modern day construction and celebrates Britten.
I have also been working with CCTV cameras within my studio practice and noticed mounted deer antlers above the entrants on the inside of the barn. I have been working on the idea of the hunter being the hunted in relation to our current society and the way the government keeps tabs on us with constant CCTV monitoring, I have taken the subject of the CCTV camera and mounted it in the same way a trophy kill is mounted. I would like to propose a third idea of replacing the deer antlers with one of my mounted cameras as a nod to the barn and its history.
