- Venue
- Streets of London
- Starts
- Sunday, February 1, 2015
- Ends
- Sunday, March 1, 2015
- Address
- Various locations throughout the capital
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Collect Connect artists / Dean Reddick
The first day of February and London shivers in the grip of winter, an appropriate time for us to launch the Dwell Exhibition and to be thankful for our dwellings; retreats from the freezing sleet, wind and rain.
We have 30 nets to present from artists around the world. Each day we will be releasing one of these paper sculptures onto the streets of the city.
http://collectconnect.blogspot.co.uk/
There is something magical about a ‘net’; a two dimensional plan that has the potential to become a three dimensional form. The net is flat and often abstract in appearance. These two dimensional nets often have a
drawn geometric beauty of their own. These drawings have to be lost in order to realise the three dimensional form; acts of aggressive transformation such as cutting and tearing are needed to release the net from its life upon the surface of the paper.
A net is like a code, it contains the information to become something else, reminiscent of DNA, a net is a set of instructions for building complexity in space. The idea for this book comes from my long standing interest in nets, an interest I can trace back to my childhood where we were shown nets for simple geometric shapes and the platonic solids. These regular space-filling forms are few, consisting of the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. The impetus for this exhibition came from watching a child tear strips of paper from a sheet. The strips, torn vigorously against the edge of a ruler, became imbued with dynamic tension as they curled into spirals and arabesques. These simple forms seemed beautiful to me and my love of nets was re-awakened. The idea of collecting a compendium of nets based on the idea of ’Dwell’ follows on from previous Collect Connect projects (see Stuart Simler ‘CardBoard City’ 2013). Dwelling seems to me to be a fundamental state for people animals and plants. There is the concrete dwelling, a place such as a home, a nest, a den. There is the idea of dwelling on something, to think and mull over, which suggests that the mind is a place where thoughts and ideas can rest, at least for a while. For me, the idea of dwelling implies a private space or state of mind even
though a dwelling might be shared.
Finally I hope that Dwell also makes us aware of the social economic and
political aspects of dwelling; dispossession, homelessness, war, asylum and refugees, habitat destruction and the emotional states where we cannot dwell but must endlessly move so that we become strangers in our own bodies. I hoped that all of these and many more associations and interpretations would arrive in net form from the international groups of artists who are the essence and life blood of the Collect Connect projects. I am not disappointed and over the following days you will find nets for all sorts of Dwellings: Castles and villas, shelters and beds for dreaming in, dragons, homes, horses and much more. Dean Reddick 2015.
