In the 8th exhibition of the SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, artists Liz Davis, Clare Gerrard and Susanna Jacobs present work exploring different aspects of wild nature in the city.

Liz Davis’ work involves the passing of time, with two projects on past and future. In the fifty years the flora of the city has altered; Liz Davis’ first project sets out to find plants which exemplify these changes. These mounted specimens will become part of the Natural History Museum’s archive. Through painting and sculpture, Davis’ second project looks to the deep future when humans abandon the City, the Golden Lane Estate reverts to nature, and a new ecology emerges. The buildings are overgrown, Great Arthur House will be alive with birds, and the now manicured open spaces will become thickets within which wild animals will roam.

Drawn from field research carried out in the City, Clare Gerrard has made a document of a present day landscape of the City and Golden Lane. Since the Golden Lane Estate was built in 1958 the natural enviroment of the area has changed drastically. Once it was surrounded by bombsites and ruins and yet full of wildlife, plants and birds. Now wildlife survives temporaily before it is routinely cleared from the streets and parks or sites as they are developed. The is a record of wild plants and flowers found growing in the City today.

Susanna Jacobs is showing an installation of drawing and animation. The austere simplicity of the architecture of Golden Lane Estate is seen as a group of stage sets where the drama of the past canc be re-imagined. The estate becomes wilderness, and nature is resurgent in scenes reminiscent not just of the overgrwon ruins of the Blitz, but also of the primitive landscape of prehistoric London.

*FIREWEED (rosebay willow herb/epilobium angustifolium), A plant that grew on the bomb site that became Golden Lane Estate, it is known as a flower that grows easily on earth that has been burnt.

15 - 31 July 2010

In the seventh exhibition of the SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, British artist, Camilla Brueton, extends her body of work on examining the relationship between people and architecture. Resulting in a series of drawings and photographic montages that highlight how the individual lives and makes their mark within the uniformity of high-density housing. The living spaces within Golden Lane Estate are compact but thoughtfully designed. A change in flooring delineates an ‘indoor balcony’ within some studio flats, doors slide rather than open in places, light and air flow through.

Fifty years on from their original conception the design of Golden Lane Estate is still relevant to contemporary living, and Brueton’s work goes some way towards celebrating and highlighting these design features. This exhibition follows on from ‘Societea’, a 2-week community event last summer which transformed the gallery into a ‘tea-hut’, exchanging tea and homemade cake for conversation with the residents of the estate. In the run up to ‘Societea II: Tea, Time and Interiors’, Brueton has turned the tables this time and invited herself round to people’s homes for a cup of tea and a chat exploring how they live, what they think about their space and the Estate, and giving her the chance to document the layout of their living space.

Focusing mainly on studio flats, where intelligent design is paramount due to the limitations of space, Brueton explored resident’s living rooms, the primary social space within a flat. This is where you eat, socialise, and the place you welcome visitors to, in effect the most ‘public’ area of your home. Using photography Brueton captures the different styles, layouts, tastes and personality’s residents project into this space allowing the viewer to get a glimpse into the duo personal and private life of a home. Scratching beneath the uniform exterior of high-density housing, Brueton has been privileged in seeing what it looks like behind some of the colorful front doors of the estate.

Brueton has also produced a series of delicately hand drawn ‘maps’ of various flats visited during her residency. Using mapping extensively in her work, Brueton exploits a system already inherent within our visual vocabulary (a floor plan, a metro map …) to communicate something of the way space is actually used by people and capture an essence of a place, time and activity beyond typical cartography.

Previous examples include a project mapping the use of the Mexico City metro as a site for exchange (beggars, buskers, health care professionals immunising children, political activists spreading the word…), and a large scale text map capturing a snapshot of Roman Road in East London (a vibrant mix of constantly changing shops juxtaposed with businesses which have been in families for generations) and its history, as told by its shopkeepers. Using architects drawings and detailed floor plan as a starting point, Brueton’s maps draw attention to the realities of living compactly and contrast the architect’s imagined spaces with the realities of cotemporary habitation.

Though one may interpret Antoniou’s work as an elegiac journey through loss and trauma, in the sixth exhibition of the SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, she engages on a philosophical and aesthetic level in subverting rationalist distinctions between real and constructed space.

By examining and interpreting fragments of modernist design like an archaeologist, or an anthropologist, Antoniou draws from the formal and aesthetic qualities of modernist architecture in order to transgress their vocabulary into distressing objects and installations. Her spatial interventions and installations question the constructed nature of delimiting devices - dividing lines, political boundaries and in particular the Cyprus Green Line- in order to problematise the use of the architectural forms they engage with. Instead, the artist’s work, signals towards a modernist aesthetic vocabulary that unravels the scheme of a political and historical utopia.

‘Klitsa Antoniou juxtaposes photography, everyday objects with drawing in order to reveal the complexities of memory, loss, trauma and space in relation to geo-political, art historical, aesthetic, and identity issues. Her constructed spaces, inspired by the ruins of the dividing line and the abject of the space, the dead zone as it is otherwise known, become spaces where through an interrogation of modernist architectural aesthetics she can reveal the interruptions of history in the spatiality of the city in order to create another possibility of history.’

Dr. Gabriel Koureas, Art Historian

Challenging the idea of Utopia as the source of reflection, Antoniou draws on the Golden Lane Estate and the Green Line that divide the island of Cyprus as the point of reference to create this series of visual dimension, which powerfully express her preoccupation against what we came to expect from this historic border or dividing line. And it is exactly this desire of reflection that allows the artist to create a new possibility of thought, where identities can be overdone and the binaries and dualisms that dominate the Cypriot culture can be re-thought and contested.

As one of the Super Estate Projects’ community event, EXHIBIT hosts ‘Fireweed’ an exhibition and event focused on the exploration of the natural enviroment in the City. Since the estate was built in 1968 the natural enviroment of the area has changed dratically. once it was surrounded by bombsites and ruins and yet full of wildlife, plants and birds. Now very little wildlife remains as the empty sites are built on and churchyards, gardens and streets are routinely cleared of weeds. What is the future of natural wildlife in the square mile? During this event artists Liz Davis, Clare Gerrard and Susanna Jacobs will explore the past and present flora and fauna of the City.

This event is kindly sponsered by City of London Police, the artists would like to thank Dr Mark Spencer and Liz Jellinek of the Natural History Museum for their support and expertise. Also to Lee at Plaisterers’ Hall and Clare Maddison.

Anthrophusion Laboritories allows those who care about the environment to cut their personal impact in half using an advanced medical process. Over the course of a year and a series of sessions, two people who agree to undergo the process have their DNA merged, and their cognitive proteins combined. By the end of the sessions, the two patients are virtually identical; a mental and physical synthesis of the two individuals. Both peoples’ identities are manifested in each (nearly) identical body. The more successful of the two merged bodies is kept and appointed as the continuation of both individuals, resulting in half the environmental impact.

Anthrophusion Laboratories from Elliott P. Montgomery on Vimeo.

OPEN GALLERY / Public drop-in:

29th April - 1st May (Thursday - Saturday) &

4th - 6th May (Tuesday - Thursday) / 11am - 6pm

WORKSHOP

3rd - 4th May (Monday & Tuesday)

Morning 10am - 11am & Afternoon 2pm - 4pm

LIFT OFF / Filming

7th or 8th May (Friday or Saturday, depending upon the weather)

Starting at 1pm in the EXHIBIT Gallery. Last for approximately 2 hours. There are 8 places open for people to assist throwing the paperplanes to help create the film. If you like to take part please contact us: info@exhibit-goldenlane.com

26 April -  20 May 2010

In the 5th SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, resident artist Katharina Lackner will momentarily alter the space of the Golden Lane Estate in an attempt to awaken a kind of poetic anarchy sleeping in all of us.

Lackner’s work focuses on interventions and the creation of conceptually based social objects; she creates installations and videos which explore site specificity, boundaries between public and private space and the engagement of passers-by in public areas.

Throughout her residency at EXHIBIT, Lackner will invite residents and public to take part in workshops to learn and share knowledge of paper plane folding techniques.  During these informal drop-in sessions and workshops, paper planes of all kinds will be folded and participants are invited to print short personal messages on their planes.

These paper planes will be collected and released to fly on the Golden Lane Estate on the 7th May 2010.  The process will be documented on film and finally presented at the end of her residency on May 16th.

31 March - 24 April 2010

“We were all going to move forward together, everything could change, and everything was going to be much better. We were going to rebuild this Britain, and the old order was going to be broken. In this country, it would never be the same again.”

Emerging from the destruction of post war England, there was a chance to begin again. The Golden Lane Estate marked a highpoint for the promise of a new society. A new generation of architects, inspired by the Modern Movement, had the opportunity to put their ideas into practice. Weaving together personal recollections of a generation, the work recreates a moment in time, full of conviction, and belief in the possibilities of a brave new world.

In the fourth exhibition of the SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, Thomas Haywood’s new work reflects his interest in the relationship between people and place, and a particular moment in time. Working with images and fragments of conversations, the viewer is invited into the thoughts and reflections of a generation, and the complex relationship between ideals and their realisation. Rather than documenting the locale of the estate itself, the installation recreates the thinking that nurtured the ideas and design behind the estate.

Comment:

http://www.artlicks.com/events/405/everything-together

Whether leaving it in a public place or passing it on to a friend, BookCrossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then in turn do likewise. This unique method of recycling books draws timely attention to the democracy of reading and the book as object.

On 6th March between 2 - 3.30pm we released 42 new Penguin books as part of the BIBLIOLOGY exhibition at EXHIBIT. These new books were ’crossed’ with books brought in by 36 participants and released into the wilds of Golden Lane Estate. Luckily it was a sunny, if chilly day, and by the next morning all but one of the books had been caught and that was a little hidden under some steps, so had probably been overlooked.

It was a lovely, friendly event and people came from near and far to contribute enthusiastically to the BookCrossing. One dedicated Book crosser travelled down from Oxford especially and was a helpful presence during the afternoon. Over tea and biscuits there were many passionate conversations about favourite books and why they had chosen the book they had brought in to cross. There were some notable coincidences – two copies of Murakami’s ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ were swapped in the hope of inspiring other would-be runners to go for it, and someone was very pleased to acquire his 5th copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as he had given away the others to friends because he loved the novel so much. And people seemed to find exactly the right Great Ideas Penguin, whether for themselves or to pass on to someone close to them, e.g. George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ was pertinent reading for a friends young journalist daughter, and the ‘Writings from the Zen Masters’ found a perfect temporary home with a pinhole photographer of great spirit.

Many new BookCrossers were inspired by this activity and enjoyed the opportunity to wander through the classic Modernist architecture of this very special estate looking for places to release their books. The onward journeys of these books may become quite international as a few people spoke about sending their new book off to relatives or friends in Spain, America and Australia, and one said that they would take it on holiday to Bermuda and read and release, so we look forward to tracking their journeys in the future.

Image by: Chau Yiu Yan / Ming Magazine

Image by: Chau Yiu Yan / Ming Magazine

Image by: Chau Yiu Yan / Ming Magazine

Image by: Ruth Sewell

Image by: Ruth Sewell

Image by: Ann Walker

26 February - 20 March 2010

In the third exhibition of the SUPER ESTATE PROJECTS, British artist, Kathryn Faulkner, extends her body of work on reading to produce a series of photographs that highlight the role of books in Golden Lane Estate. The estate is comprised of nine residential blocks, each with a dynamic demographic of people. Many have lived there since the estate opened alongside more recent residents, including those who work in the creative industries as designers, architects, artists, writers and academics - all attracted by the unique and varied characteristics of the estate.

During her residency at EXHIBIT, Faulkner has visited numerous residents and observed how they live with books. Drawn to the intimate scale of the living spaces, she has engaged in conversations about individual experiences with books. Faulkner captures moments that represent personal relationships with reading and with the book as object. Whilst the flats are all architecturally similar, the occupants have customized each interior, focusing on their individuality through book collection and display. On one hand, Bibliology at Golden Lane Estate distills the diversity of approaches; and on the other, emphasizes the idiosyncratic ways in which residents furnish their homes.

Concentrating on the book as object, the still lives draw attention to the collecting impulse that is evident in many homes. Whether a stack of favorite books, or books yet to be read, they speak of serious intent and a desire for self-improvement and new experience. The larger views of storage systems – bookcases, staircases – show how often books can furnish a home and reveal the owner’s history, interests and bias. A series of colour pinhole photographs of residents reading in their favorite spot are projected in the enclosed space downstairs and allude to the absorbing nature of reading; the ephemeral presence of the reader in their space, and the inevitable passing of time.

Shot on medium format film and traditionally hand printed full frame, Faulkner consciously chose a methodology in keeping with Modernism’s ‘truth to materials’ ethos. Reading is a democratic and universal activity, be it for knowledge and pleasure or work, and this snapshot of literary life on Golden Lane Estate proves that despite the rise of electronic publishing, the book still holds its place in the affections of the people who live there.

“A concern for a contained image, one in which all the elements are balanced, means that my photographs are not straight documentary reflections.

SPECIAL EVENT: BOOK CROSSING
Saturday 6th March 2010 at 2pm

Book crossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise after they have read the book. The finder identifies the book by registering its unique number at www.bookcrossing.com and so the book can be tracked in its future journeys across the world. Bring along a book of your own to release into the wilds of Golden Lane Estate and help make the whole world a library.

This exhibition is kindly sponsored by Penguin Books and Bayeux Ltd.