‘Who Will Provide’ Exhibition at The Crypt Gallery
31/10 – 4/11 2018
Our group of thirty three MFA students explored and responded to themes relating to charity and its place in today’s world. The exhibition presented a collection of site specific works, ranging from painting to sculpture, assemblage to video through to performance and photography.
Before the summer break preparations started by putting together various teams to properly organise and execute the event. The members of the research team responded to the site by looking into its history, connecting it to its past and designed the theme ’Who Will Provide?’ around the wish list, a document from 1995 which outlined the desired purpose for the building. This included shelter and provision for the homeless, serving the nearby student population and a focal point for community activities.
I volunteered to join the Installation Team. Over the summer I visited the crypt twice with the view to inform myself about the site (wall space, wall and ceiling heights, location of electrical outlets etc.) and to explore a potential location for my own work.
Two weeks prior to the event the curating team got in touch and supplied our team with a list of required tools and materials. We also received technical information on some more complicated works and installing requirements from The Crypt Gallery itself (No drilling of new holes!). There was very good collaboration between curating and installation team and minor installation problems were efficiently dealt with.
SKILLS: HANDLING ARTWORK, COLLABORATION, PROBLEM SOLVING, ATTENTION TO DETAIL,
SITE SPECIFIC WORKING
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey
Artist couple Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been producing award-winning art using living materials and processes from nature for more than twenty years.
Many of their projects have been in collaboration with scientific institutions and have involved pioneering research.
Some of their best-known works – presented in a lecture in Spring 2019 at Wimbledon college – have used a new technique to manipulate the process of plant photosynthesis to create different tints of yellows and greens. Working with scientists from the UK Institute of Grassland an Environmental Research, the pair developed a strain of ‘stay-green’ grass seed and specialized drying methods. The process allows them to project a negative image onto the grass as it grows in a darkened room, effectively transforming a piece of turf into a variety of photographic paper. From close up the grass pictures look like an ordinary stretch of lawn, but from a distance they resemble vintage photographs.
Another project, Beuys’s Acorns’ explores the currency of ideas associated with trees and their cultural impact, and provokes questions about our relationship with nature and climate.
The couple collected over seven hundred acorns from Beuys’s trees and potted them at their studio in England. (Some of these saplings were also planted outside of 6 Burlington Garden during the exhibition ’EARTH- Art of a Changing World’ in December 2006 at the Royal Academy). Around 300 saplings survived and continue to grow.
Like Beuys’s original project, ‘7000 Oaks’, theirs is a time-based work: it can take eighty years for an oak to reach maturity. If the trees survive, they may spawn thousands of other oaks. By nurturing the saplings, the artists have sought to raise awareness to the issues of climate change and to the importance of trees by initiating ongoing research with the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester and the UCL Environmental Institute in London.
