I have previously created some small interventions while I was attending sessions at The Sainsbury Centre. Although these were quite small they still made people react, I arranged two crossings to the path, one a series of similar sized sticks and the other a trail of sawdust across a path around the UEA broad. This caused passers by to step over, break their stride and jump the intervention. A very small item but one that caused a reaction.
For this project we had to just draw the idea and show how the space could be intervened. Money was no object, we could think big.
I was fully intending to leave the university to see what would influence me or spark and idea. However I had only taken one flight of steps and I looked back to wonder if there was anything I could do with the stairs in St Georges.
How much more fun would it be if half the stairs were turned into a slide? Health and safety out of the window but that wasn't my concern. We discussed everyone's interventions after the exercise and one of my fellow students wondered what was going to happen to the space under the slide. I hadn't considered this at the time but then you start to think about these small spaces and what they could hide or contain.
I then went outside and stood on St George's bridge for a while to consider something I could create in the river. I thought about a giant fish or whale that was breaking the surface, then I wondered about whether a bridge to nowhere could be built, a bridge that you couldn't get to, a bridge you couldn't cross.
As I continued to walk along the river the Cathedral caught my eye above the rooftops and I started to think about what I could do with this. Clearly structurally an impossible idea but I wanted to put the idea down anyway. I was wondering if I could create an inverted spire on top of the existing one. It wasn't until I drew the idea up and we discussed it after the session that the idea of perhaps a laser show or even a hologram could be created to make the idea reality. I need to explore this possibility, even if it is massively ambitious, maybe I could visually make this more understandable.
My final piece was more of an environmental piece. As I walked past a car park I was looking at the spare spaces and started to think about taking one of these spaces and creating a sealed glass container that takes up the space but is full of the amount of petrol one car would use in it's life (or perhaps just a year)... research required! Again health and safety not withstanding this would visually create quite a statement.
As part of the brief we were asked to look at: http://www.artcornwall.org/exhibitions/intervention-decoration.htm
Different artists approached the project in different ways, from decorative to using text. Cornelia Parker used Philip Larkin’s poem 'This Be The Verse' -
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Parker set the verse as an ‘non-conformist epitaph’ engraved on a block of slate, it was positioned opposite a Wesleyan Church and graveyard, the positioning of the piece as important as the piece itself.
Another artist Ruth Ewan used a Town Cryer to give out messages. Although delivered in the expected format of a Town Cryer the messages were abstract and followed up by posters displayed in local former pub. The interruptions were almost left hanging in the air, Ewan using language as an intervention in a public space, rather than a physical, visual experience.
Intervention/Decoration was the inaugural project by Foreground, a new contemporary art commissioning organisation based in Frome, Somerset.
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