|
Artworks
Road works barriers and plastic construction equipment
(Dimensions variable )
Creative Utilities' apologise for the disruption caused by necessary (now essential) above ground sculptural plumbing. |
location:
Patterdale Youth Hostel
dates:
throughout
OS grid ref:
NY 399 157
getting out there:
Patterdale Youth Hostel is 400m south of Patterdale village on A592 Ullswater road. Regular buses from Penrith.
|
Artworks is an installation resembling a utilities company operation working with barriers, cones, signage, piping and digging in which the artist assumes the role of utilities worker.
Commonly, such essential works represent disruption and functionality and are considered ugly and of no aesthetic or critical value. Such workings take place when the essential infrastructure of human habitation needs servicing. Then the plastic barriers appear and holes are dug creating a temporary (though necessary) blot on the landscape. When this happens in rural areas or sites of natural beauty these methods and materials contrast sharply with the romantic ideas of the landscape. Yet areas such as the Lake District contain other 'pockets' of similar ugliness. Old mine workings, farming and tourism all throw up and have resulted in forms that aren't conventionally beautiful. In this the Park's authority acts like a curator managing and controlling aesthetic quality so that romantic and sublime values are maximised and 'disruptions' kept to a minimum. In such protected areas, art in the landscape often works within the romantic tradition - perhaps with the addition of the critique in contemporary times. But what if an artist was to disrupt the romantic and present the disruptions as 'Artworks' ? To take utilitiarian/functional methods and materials and to work with them artistically in a site of natural beauty...to challenge ideas of beauty and ugliness, and to disrupt ideas of functionality and utility. This is the premise of 'Artworks' aka The Creative Utitlities company. The installation consisting of a site hut (as artist's studio) together with coloured pipe workings within barriers plus cones and signage is an imaginative and playful response to the idea of essential works in natural surroundings, and has been created with the intention to invite the viewer to question their ideas of the beautiful, the functional and the 'art work'.
|
|
