Site-Specific Work and Public Engagement at Show RCA 2013
19 June 2013 – Giant crucifixes, the skinning of buildings, public projections of inner secrets and taking over advertising billboards: this year’s Fine Art graduates have well and truly taken over the Battersea campus, exhibiting beyond the gallery space.
While there is a long-standing tradition of site-specific work at the College, the bringing together of all four Fine Art programmes this year has helped catalyse a body of energy, and more students than ever have maximised their surrounding environment and the College support in navigating operational and health and safety aspects.
Senior tutor in Printmaking, Finlay Taylor, who has overseen the external works, said: ‘Infiltrating peculiar spaces helps inform students’ work in many different ways. It’s a good tactic. Doing it here at the College is a safe and supported environment, which is a stepping-stone to doing this in the wider world and making impact. It makes the whole site more exciting.’
Sculpture graduate Lucy Joyce has taken over a Primesight billboard on Battersea Bridge Road, opposite the Dyson Building. The large format photograph depicts a ghostly figure on the roof of a bungalow, with a strapline, ‘please believe me’. It will be backlit and shown day and night for the duration of the graduate show, from 17–30 June.
For Lucy, whose work centres around interventions with buildings, whenever an artist makes a piece, they are asking the viewer to ‘please believe them’. Putting this in an advertising context questions what art is and what its boundaries are.
Lucy wanted to do a piece outside of the College gallery for her graduate show to continue her site-specific way of working. Please Believe Me complements a structural piece within the gallery, as well as print images of a performance done in Los Angeles.
Printmaking graduate, Eleanor Wright, meanwhile, has covered part of the Sculpture building in a rubberised pink paint that will be peeled off during the show. Coloured a light pink, the industrial masking surface substance references skin and echoes the colour of the building behind.
‘The presence of this colour on the building means its becomes like a skin – it’s an active layer,’ Eleanor explained.
Driven by environmental context, Eleanor is interested in how different sorts of spaces bring about new types of architecture. She wanted to use a brick exterior as, with an uneven surface, it is a more challenging. Her Printmaking foundations have come into play, allowing her to explore the interplay between the 2D in a 3D space. She added: ‘Printmaking hones in on the surface, material quality and process. This work sits between different media.’
Expect to encounter Photography graduate Clare Bottomley in and around the Battersea campus, bearing a giant crucifix. Clare, whose work spans performance, site-specific, photography and film and has involved re-enacting religious scenes, will also show the same crucifix falling on top of her on a 5m x 4m banner stretching across the Dyson Building.
Giving religious iconography such externality and scale, in a place that competes with advertising, highlights the prevalence of religion, even in a secular society, and aims to show how it permeates social structures and behaviours, Clare says.
Printmaking graduate Marianne Keating’s _Tell Me _will project responses to a series of questions onto building around the Battersea campus through the evenings and nights of the show.
‘My child is not my partner’s’, is just one of the anonymous responses to a series of very private questions, such as ‘what’s the biggest secret you have?’ Marianne gathered responses to such questions over several months leaving postcards about her project in public places from cafes to doctors’ surgeries.
Marianne said: ‘The juxtaposition of the private and the public; the public deciding to secretly divulge their inner thoughts, which are then projected back in a public sphere, allows an anonymous tension to be reached.’
Marianne’s text-based work and installations incorporate animated digital projections onto architectural facades and internal experiential environments. These are created through multiple projectors, monitor-based moving image, photographic documentation, publications and large-scale screen-printed wallpapers.
‘Participatory, democratic art that engages with the public, outside of the gallery, is not about setting a standard in a designated room and labelling it art. There’s not a defined audience and it’s not elitist. For me, it’s about working with the public to create a piece,’ she added.
For full details of Show RCA 2013, click here.