Market Estate Project

Great News! Joe and I have been selected for the Market Estate Project.

http://www.marketestateproject.com

It's a fantastic community art project. Market Estate is a 1960s housing estate (with a lot of social problems) near Caledonian Road. It's being demolished and rebuilt for the community. But before the bulldozers move in they are inviting 50 artists to take over the flats and make a 'creative playground' of the empty flats, facades and public spaces.

Over 350 artists applied and the proposal that Joe (my studio-mate) and I submitted has been selected to the top 50.

We're proposing to make an installation that explores the relationships between colour, memory, danger and notions of home as a response to the particular kind of domestic setting of the building's location and the period in which it was built.

We aim to re-create a 1967 living room, but paint everything in the space (including the walls, floors, ceiling, fixtures & fittings, domestic objects, personal items) with fluorescent yellow paint. Like Denis Severs' House we intend the space to feel as if it is inhabited but the resident has temporarily left the room. There will be mundane objects such as a half-eaten piece of toast for example, and a cup of tea that will signify this presence - all coloured fluorecent yellow.

We've decided to use fluorescent yellow because of the many things it is used to represent in everyday life: safety, danger, authority, rebellion and hope. These themes were prevalent in the 1960s: the hope and safety of utopian housing schemes, the uncertainty and danger of the atomic bomb, the changing form of antiquated authority and the rebellion against authority by young and student movements.

These themes can be seen to resonate with concerns arising once more in today's society as well as the imminent demolition of this building. Furthermore, the colour can be read as a caricature of the nuclear age due to its violent glow. Like the 'space city' architecture of the Market Estate building, nuclear power was supposed to herald harmony and prosperity, instead results yielded unforeseen, sometimes catastrophic, side-effects. It's our aim that the ubiquitiousness and luminosity of the colour will alter the viewer's perceptions of time, space and the formal nature of the objects in the room. We hope the environment will become an uncanny immersive reality.

We hope the work will be reflect a sense of hope and optimism but be unnervingly saturated. We intend to evoke both a nostalgia for the utopian idealism of the 1960s (a paradise lost) but also question whether in the context of the Market Estate it could rather be seen as a promise gone sour.


If anyone has 20L of fluorescent yellow paint they could spare... we'd be very grateful!!