After completing a residency in September 2021 at Centrala Gallery, organised by Punch Records, I was commissioned alongside photographer Hayley Salter.
Initial theme: roaming
Through discussion, sharing ideas, exploring possible themes
TITLE: Re-worlding
Themes
Re-worlding: To reconstruct the world, or attempt to view it differently.
Solarpunk:
Solarpunk is a genre of speculative fiction that is also its own distinguished aesthetic, focusing mainly on renewable energy, living in harmony with nature, and the better future envisioned through both. Solarpunk also emphasizes handcrafted wares (as opposed to mass-produced products) and community. The 'punk' in Solarpunk comes from the genre's anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist nature, as well as its strong focus on community and prefigurative politics
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Solarpunk
Punch Commission
Combine my sculptural practice with Hawley’s photography practice
RE-WORLDING
Definition: To reconstruct the world or attempt to view it differently.
Provide an alternative world/space/stage/happening
Possible theme –
· Alternate Future.
· Future History - Overgrown city
· What used to be here?
· Alternative Green Space.
Birmingham lacks green space
Creates a green space within Centrala
· Word Cloud: Nature. Wellbeing. Plants growing up the wall. Past and Present.
· Workshop that could create things they could take away
Like Bob Marley Tree
Plastecine
Polystyrine
· Instagramable: Something to sit on with a backdrop.
· Choir to create a soundtrack to the alternate future downstairs
Day and Night theme:
· The two spaces used to communicate different times of the day.
· Projections used for night time.
· Showcase photos from Birmingham’s past
Collaborate with Birmingham Library
· Use Jacob’s space as production suite
· Have memories or ideas that hang from a tree
· Something to do with how to enter the space
Tree’s cover arch entrance
Take off shoes
· Foam Flooring to change the landscape
· Spaces divided
Split floor theme:
First floor – main projection and floor sculpture seating
Some kind of divide – e.g. curtain that separates the bar area and the projection area
Chip away sculpture – cast in colour scheme – have paper bags that people can take home – could be chalk/or plaster – can be marbled with colour scheme – cast into geometric ruin structure
Colours – colour psychology – linking to cleanliness
re-imagined industrial landscape
solarpunk – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
Solarpunk is a literary genre and art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, human impact on the environment, climate change, and pollution. It is a subgenre within science fiction, aligned with cyberpunk derivatives, and may borrow elements from utopian and fantasy genres.
Plant pots with indoor plants, jezmonite pots in colour scheme
walls in gallery – second floor – geometric cut outs – creating a ruin – landscape – maze like – commission plane structure to make walls – paint with colour scheme – modular walls – flat pack walls -
go to plane structure next week – talk to team ask about quote – timescale
http://plane-structure.co.uk/
soundscape - - speakers hidden in boxes
weird harmonies – gentle soundscape – mindfulness – deep breathing
reimagining the future –
outdoors – film of the choir performing
Find choir – meet with them – workshop – mood board – write a description proposal.
20th research into choirs – 3rd schedule meeting with Choir - June – record
Renting speakers
Concrete transfers – slabs with image transfers e.g., bark and plant life
Placed onto wall with projection on top -
Images cast into resin
Series of collaborative sculptural pieces – incorporating archives
Finding archives of green spaces
Blueprint of green space – cut into laser cut file and encase into concrete
How green spaces can exist in different areas
Research greener alternatives to concrete
Projections
Creating a mindful landscape – lights, colours, silhouettes – abstracted nature and green spaces, archives, - link back to soundscape
Scent-scape
e.g. natural smelling materials, e.g., soil, compost, hay, - possibly incorporate into sculpture
or paper piece that is covered in a perfume
Mutual exchange
Map of new city – resource pack. Takeaway sculpture, object.
themed drink e.g., matcha
Tuesday, Wednesday
Thursday 4th August – official launch day
Sunday/Monday – remove work
Textural surfaces
Instagrammable feature
Picture wall – blown up on fabric – possibly projected on? Sculpture blends into wall
Secret garden – break out room – lost/hidden environments
Disconnected space
Reclaimed green spaces
2.5K – money to create
£500 fee – invoice again another 500, at end another 500
2 weeks’ time – photoshoot
Budget:
Commission group of singers to create a soundscape for the future
Possibly reads some articles books on environmentalism e.g. Gretta Thunberg
Walls and flooring
Costing for sculpture – e.g. materials
Projection room
Curtain that separates room
Choir to commission:
Artefact gallery – singing group https://www.facebook.com/events/artefact/stirchley-singing-group/577749576027384/
Roxanne Korda – Infinite Opera
Utopian soundscape – could ideas of utopia form a lyric
Direct group with different sound making activities
e.g., Breathing, meditative base – calming sounds
connection between singing and environment – growth and community
Scans of my project proposal
Retro-futurism
Concrete Blocks
Leaves – canopy – photos to place into concrete
Merge with resin –
Video projection – positive brainwashing experience
Stan Brakhage
add into colour scheme – collage video clips – zoom in or speed up clips
multiple screen effect
layer
Botanical gardens video – e.g. rocks or patterns inverted colours and visual collaging or layering
Karin Ruggaber – influence for sculptural relief
• Re-Worlding Birmingham’s city centre was once surrounded by trees, green spaces and nature - what if that never went away? Enter an alternate timeline of a city inspired by Birmingham, which will see visitors experience the past, present and future of the city through a green lens. Hayley Salter & Jacob Carter collaborate to Re-world the city into an alternative landscape. You will enter an unfamiliar environment, which will isolate the senses, and immerse your imagination into an exciting exhibition. Re-worlding will explore themes of Environmentalism, Wellbeing and Birmingham’s history; by using photography, sculptures, projections, interactive visual art, sound and a scentscape - that will leave audiences escaping from the modern city they once knew, into a world unknown.
Radical ways of reimagining the city and public space
Define Re-worlding – to re-world – to make a world anew – creating new space for living. Imaging a new alternative way of existing, with a care and community focussed society/
Climate movement – critique on city planning - lack of green spaces
Inspirations from utopian city planning and solar punk
Re-world = To reconstruct the world, or attempt to view it differently.
transformative infrastructure
Everyday found fragments – looking at how these discarded objects can be transformed into something beautiful – with aesthetic value
Mysticism of objects – the arrangement and display of objects
Connection back to art production – referencing the production of the art object – remove the perceived genius of the artist – expose the production and process involved in the making of work
Project description
• Re-Worlding Birmingham’s city centre was once surrounded by trees, green spaces and nature - what if that never went away? Enter an alternate timeline of a city inspired by Birmingham, which will see visitors experience the past, present and future of the city through a green lens. Hayley Salter & Jacob Carter collaborate to Re-world the city into an alternative landscape. You will enter an unfamiliar environment, which will isolate the senses, and immerse your imagination into an exciting exhibition. Re-worlding will explore themes of Environmentalism, Wellbeing and Birmingham’s history; by using photography, sculptures, projections, interactive visual art, sound and a scentscape - that will leave audiences escaping from the modern city they once knew, into a world unknown.
sensory environments
Birmingham’s city centre was once surrounded by trees, green spaces and nature. Inspired by research into the city’s archive
Exploring themes of from utopian city planning, environmentalism, mindfulness and solar punk, escapism into nature,
nature and urban spaces and where they crossover.
Taking inspiration from Birmingham’s archive, city planning and lack of green spaces, revaluating it in our present climate – exploring alternative ways of imaging the city
Re-Wording presents
Exploring radical ways of reimagining the city and public space through a green lens.
Investigating the process of re-worlding, an attempt to remake the world or view it differently, looking at creating a new space for living. Imaging a new alternative way of existing, with a care and community focussed society.
Taking influence from utopian city planning, environmentalism, mindfulness and solar punk, Carter and Salter combine their practices to present an alternative utopian view of the city. Blending together past, present and future, the exhibition creates an alternative landscape and allow visitors to escape in an immersive installation involving photography, sound, sculpture, projection and scentscape.
Climate movement – critique on city planning - lack of green spaces
Anne Hardy, Liquid Landscape, 2018
Exhibition visit to The Whitworth gallery, manchester
Anne Hardy’s walk-in sculptural installations – which she calls FIELDworks – combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive, sensory environments that are both convincing and fragile. She regards these installations as sentient spaces; environments that can be temporarily inhabited but have lives of their own, altering and changing regardless of visitors or time. Imagining the city as a sea in constant flux, with tides and backwaters akin to our unconscious, she creates alternative versions of our everyday world using materials and objects, sounds and other intangible things that she finds in places which she describes as ‘pockets of wild space … where loose-ends, feelings and thoughts collect.’
Anne Hardy is internationally recognised for her photography and large-scale sculptural installations or ‘FIELDWORKS’, which combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive and sensual environments. These works derive from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather. Hardy thinks of these works as moments out of time – voids within the ‘everyday’ space, that act as a spell or dream in which to re-encounter our relationships to the worlds that we inhabit.
enter her theatrical environments, which hover between reality and unreality, at once strange and familiar, abstract and representational.
These are sites where we become acutely aware of our own presence, encouraged to reimagine our present moment while considering potential futures.
terrazzo linoleum flooring
mix with fabric on floor
6-10 participants for singing group
Walls:
Matt Foster
Initial sketches for walls.
Working the sizing, proportions and main structure
Planning for the exhibition - 3D modelling
used ScketchUp to create an accurate 3D model of centrala
Imported drawings of walls to trace around and build shapes
Allowed me to change wall size and thickness and colour almost immediately
Worked well as a tool to visualise the project to producers and Hayley - when at meetings we could make changes from suggestions very quickly
Allowed me to play with the curation of the space - where the walls might be located
Can zoom into view - see what it is like for 1st person perspective - allow to have walkthrough of gallery - see what the audience members journey would be like
Once a final design for the walls was created I could simply use the measurement tool to take accurate specifications to send to the fabricator
Unfortunately, due to the ambition of our project it was way over budget. This was a helpful process in understanding costing. I had to make many changes - such as simplifying the shape of the walls, the amount of them and their overall size.
However, due to the business of the commonwealth games they were not able to fulfil our plan and I had to create the walls myself. This was helpful in planning different back up plans in case things fell through. I was able to quickly source materials and transport them to the uni. From here I took a simplified approach to the walls, sketching out the design onto paper then onto the foam - cutting them out on the band saw. I also used wooden dowels to hold 2 sheets of foam on top of each other as a way to increase the height. This was not very stable so I created corner walls that are self supporting. For painting I used masking tape to mask off the edges and painted even coats. This ended up working very well and was possibly better as we realised when installing that it gave the space a much freer and open experience which matched more of our desire for a peaceful experience to reflect on wellbeing.
Curatorial Plan
We initially digitally sketch out a proposal for what we would do in the space.
Towards the end of the project when all of the artworks had been created and photographed I created an exhibition plan using the SketchUp model. Using screenshots I was able to photoshop images of the work into the space, considering which works played off each other, how they would be separated from each floor, where the print descriptions and posters would go. This was an invaluable resource and ended up being used by the install team at Plane Structure as reference for hanging. Only some minor adjustments were made once we were in the space, as some works did not quite fit into the space.
Reflection:
A very generous experience
developing project management skills
developing collaborative working skills
understanding how to work with producers
creating proposals and contacting other companies
the importance of back up plans and rigorous planning
how my practice can adapt and go in new directions through collaborations
developing my public speaking and how to articulate my own work as well as projects and plans
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