Polly Kelsall: 2012

19 November 2012

Totterdown Art Trail 2012

Series No.397, Old Magistrates Court (1-6), 2012. Giclee prints

Series 397, Drawings 1 and 2, 2012. Pencil on Japanese paper

Series 397, 2012. Digital prints.

Andre Shlimon, 15 minute piano recitals

5 November 2012

Totterdown Art Trail,16-18th November 2012

Series No. 397, Old Magistrate's Court (1-6), giclee prints

New work to be shown at 6 Firfield Street, along with Andre Shlimon (an alternative-classical pianist) and Joseph Turp (photography and film).

Continuing my search for decorative concrete screen blocks (square in square design, no.397), I came across another wall of order, repetition and pattern at the Old Magistrate's Court in the centre of Bristol.

Yet another building that is due to be demolished. A failure. The proposed development is to provide a mixed use development consisting of a hotel, shops, car parks, student accommodation.

Designed in the 1960's and built in the 1970's, empty since 2007, this building has been deemed as 'brutalist' by English Heritage with 'little intrinsic value or significance, and which relates poorly both to the surrounding historic buildings, and the townscape generally.'

Now being used as a canvas for urban/grafitti artists, this ruination is temporarily being appreciated and explored.

Whatever your opinion of the 1970's structure, the new proposed development, the temporary urban art - this building is caught between being built and falling into disuse and decay.

My aim is to capture a sense of purity and order by reducing, refining and simplifying. To explore the precarious balance between permanence and temporality, solidity and fragility, failure and success, purity and impurity, construction and destruction, chaos and order

3 October 2012

Ruminate 4 (close up)

Ruminate 4 (close-up) . 2012. Crystal archive digital print, 40x30in

Wild - living independently of man; not domesticated or tame. Growing in a natural state; not cultivated. Uninhabited; desolate. A free natural state of living. Lacking restraint or control.

Tame - changed by man from a wild state into a domesticated or cultivated condition. Not fearful of human contact. Meek or submissive.

Domesticated - to bring or keep (wild animals) under control or cultivation. To adapt to an environment

2 October 2012

Ruminate 4

Ruminate 4. Harris wool strip, pvc artificial leather, galvanised steel.

The landscape, harsh yet fragile, static yet fluid. Shaped by ice, wind and rain. A landscape devoid of trees.

Dominated by rock, peat, bog and water.

Sheep roam. Always on the move. Semi-wild.

Man controls them, marks them, shears them, kills them.

There is tension.

Tension between the wild and the domesticated, the manmade and the natural.

What is wild, domesticated and tame?

The landscape is a complex interaction between the natural processes and human activity.

Push, pull, resist, support. Fluid, temporary, adjacent.

"Holding to the ground is not that important if the ground can be reached and abandoned at whim, in a short time or in no time. On the other hand, holding too fast, burdening one's bond with mutually binding commitments, may prove positively harmful and the new chances crop up elsewhere." (Zygmunt Bauman, 'Liquid Modernity', 1999 )