If space is a product of the characteristics of society
including its values, beliefs, practices and systems of power (as proposed by
Lefebvre), then what does a specific space say about us, the way we live, the
forces shaping our society, affecting every aspect of our lives? How far do we
recognise what is really going on? Or are we too busy, unaware, uninterested,
silently complicit as our world is continually reshaped around us.
This growing body of work seeks to explore these questions
in the context of a specific urban public space. Based on GPS-data recordings
of five walks in Leeds Millennium Square prior to and during various public
events in 2018, the work emerges from the artist’s working processes of
physical engagement with the subject, data gathering and analysis, response to
everyday materials, repetition and deconstruction. In each walk the artist
intends to follow a very similar route in walking around and across the Square
in a systematic grid pattern. However, each event creates areas where the space
is no longer accessible to the public, a disruption to public space. The route
of each walk is disrupted, reflected in the GPS data.
A series of large screenprints shows these patterns of
movement in and around the Square during the public events. In each case the
pattern varies according to the specific use of the Square and the areas that become
inaccessible to the public. These prints are ‘map-like’ in nature and reflect
the process of walking, gathering data and presenting a visual representation
of how access to the space is changing.
The patterns of movement have also been deconstructed into
over 100 individual abstract fragments of space and movement, captured
individually in small screenprints and presented in large digital compositions.
These prints have been produced intuitively, exploring variations in colours,
patterns, and complexity of layering. They are a further development of the
process-based work, rather than a documentation of the process itself, but
still emphasising the complexity of each point in space and of the forces
shaping that space. These individual fragments of space are also emphasised by
transforming their scale in large monoprints.
Much of the space in which we live is subject to constant
change, which we are expected to accommodate and over which we have little
direct control. Spatial change is frequently effected by an infrastructure of
control of physical movement, most notably by steel ‘control’ barriers, near
ubiquitous objects in our urban landscape. The body of work includes three
repurposed steel crowd control barriers, integrating welded steel
representations of patterns of movement before and during the public events. Barriers
may carry multiple associations for us – they allude to restriction, control,
appropriation and protest but also to safety and leisure. Repurposing the
barriers and presenting then in an artistic context disrupts their original
function and asks the viewer to consider them in more detail, the uses to which
they are put and whether our (lack of) response to them is too complicit and
accepting.
The body of work seeks to connect multiple
viewpoints of space. The acts of walking and repetition allow the artist to
experience the changing nature of the physical space over time, to understand
it in more detail and to connect to different communities of users of the
space. The public events reveal societal context in terms of the nature of the
events and the use to which the Square is being put. The artist’s physical
engagement with the space is recorded in data, whereby the process becomes a
part of the mathematical ‘code’ of the space. The presentation of multiple
contrasting elements of the work in combined installations prompts
consideration of the complexity of the space and the artist’s processes, the
contrasts between visual appearance and functional use, and of our physical movement
in space as we encounter 2D and 3D objects.
