An opportunity to create artwork inspired by a specific location and its history, is a great opportunity to exit the white-walled art gallery and create work that can truly inhabit the location of which it speaks. An invitation to participate in the project ‘New Work at Newark Park’ a collaboration between the Cotswold Sculptors Association and the National Trust, gave me this opportunity. Newark Park is a National Trust estate and property located on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment between Bristol and Stroud.
My final MA Fine Art project involving the extraction, study and display of a large collection of terracotta flower pot shards, has led to subsequent work focussed upon low-fired earthenware clays and the myriad of terracotta shades that result upon their firing. The discovery therefore of an imposing run of a terracotta brick wall and summer house crossing the gardens of Newark Park piqued my interest at first sight.
Traversing this long and continuous serpentine wall toward the summer house at its eastern end, I noticed that the almost infinite combinations of shades and textures of its individual bricks was a work of art in itself, and a strong inspiration for a canvas upon I could tell the story of these gardens and the key people who bought about their creation and restoration.
However it was only when installed, that the interaction of the work and it’s source of inspiration (or ‘situatedness’), really hit home. The restored Newark Park summer house provided the perfect location in which to display the work in front of its plastered walls and two beautiful and quirkily irregular Georgian windows that looked out onto the gardens and the wall beyond. As this project marked a collaboration between two organisations, so my artwork became one element of a collaboration with the Summer House and the gardens outside. These immediate surroundings were providing the context for the installed work in the most powerful way that the white walls of an art gallery could never achieve. Being able to experience the contextual interaction between artwork and place has been enlightening and would be something I would definitely be interesting in exploiting in a future project.
