- Venue
- Surface Gallery
- Location
- East Midlands
Siphoned into the gallery through seemingly rigid yet temporarily fixed wooden walls, the ‘space within the space’ simultaneously reveals and conceals the work behind monolithic sand sculptures, upright boards and precarious wooden slats. Moving around is difficult; the unfixed and hard-to-see vertical glass rods and wooden structures seem deliberately positioned to trip or distract. Each time an object is knocked down, the echo of the glass hitting the floor causes the audience to look around, identifying the clumsy spectator and giggling.
Like a game of hide and seek, the audience’s childlike curiosity is engaged as they interact with the colourful sand-castles, the acid blue stretched cotton sheet and wooden structure extending across the gallery floor. The scattered glass shards refract the light and the ochre and brown which are used to create the wrapped maypoles, beams arranged on the floor and boards are punctuated by speckles of colour; but the similarities in Wain Marriott and Becky Scofield’s work doesn’t begin or end with their use of materials and palette. The work generates questions through it’s deliberate lack of clarity, but allows space for conversation through titling. Their practices seems to repeatedly merge and diffuse, changing shape and meaning from different points of view. This is reiterated by the flimsy wooden panels which extend from the gallery walls and although the constructions aren’t labelled as work, the architecture of the space begins to form the basis for exploration.
Titles are indicative of how the audience should interact with the work, giving clues about the object’s origins or providing an instruction. During the private view people began playing in the space. One individual pushed a small piece of glass inside a metal rod, quickly turning and sniggering as she walked away whilst others ‘took it in turns’ to jump through and step between the materials laid out on the floor. Whether through a naive understanding of the work or by mimicking the last person attempting not to ‘Fall Between the Gaps’ the carefully arranged sand spits were quickly obliterated.
This ‘mimicry’ extends from the artists’ creation of the work. By studying the titles of the metal tubes that are precariously leaned and the glass panes, delicately sandwiched and subjugated by the wooden structures on the floor of the gallery, it is possible form an understanding of the work by paying attention to the gallery space itself. However, rather than timidly walking around the objects or considering the tenuous links between the work, instead mediating the obstacle course that Marriott and Scofield created, particular attention is drawn to the act of experiencing by doing.
By walking through and playing in the space, interacting with the materials and using the shapes to create meaning, it’s possible to enjoy the work guilt free and unrestricted from the usual implications of a conventional gallery space. It’s refreshing to be able to experience an exhibition in this way, but there is a fear that encouraging this sort of defiance in an audience can result in a bit of a free for all!
The second installment of “The Coming Community” series is hosted by Surface Gallery and curated by Wain Marriott and Becky Scofield.
