As part of their month-long Platform residency at Site Gallery, award-winning singer, songwriter and theatre composer Gwyneth Herbert and critically acclaimed artist Mel Brimfield, invite you to add to their collection of Moore and Hepworth inspired maquettes.
The small sculptures will be arranged on a prop display unit modelled on furniture from Moore’s Perry Green studio. Your maquette will appear in the films and photographic work that Mel and Gwyneth make make during their residency and the objects will assume a sculptural presence in the gallery.
The shelves will stage encounters between the small sculptures, ranging from the comedic to considered comparisons of Hepworth and Moore’s aesthetic, formal and conceptual concerns.
Your maquette:
– Your maquette must not to be taller than 30cm, with a base no larger than 20 x 25cm.
– It must be freestanding for display on a shelf, needing no fixings for installation.
– The colour palette used should be the same muted tones, e.g. white, brown, grey as found in Moore’s and Hepworth’s maquettes.
Deliver to:
You can deliver your finished maquette to Mel and Gwyneth at Site Gallery.
More information:
“ It took a team of 10 white-gloved archaeologists and conservators at Francis Bacon’s tiny studio three years to meticulously sift, map, archive and crate innumerable filthy wine-stained, paint-encrusted stacks of crumpled and torn newspaper clippings and photographs, slashed canvases, empty champagne boxes and mucky old tin cans rusted with dried out turps and stuffed with handfuls of brushes– the entire contents, down to the very floorboards and walls that contained them, were shipped and painstakingly reconstructed for the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin in 1998. Bacon’s archivists endeavored to bottle the pungent authenticity of his studio by exactly reconfiguring it as a resolutely inauthentic staged tableau.
Taking this peculiar liminal quandary as a starting point, we will be building a fluctuating installation of sets and props, that present themselves as reconstructions of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth’s studios throughout the residency.” Mel Brimfield and Gwyneth Herbert, 2014.
Research questions:
– When does a maquette become a sculpture? It’s generally a small-scale model towards a larger work – a sketch or a prototype. It carries the immediacy of the artist’s hand, provoking an idea of intimacy with the creative process that other foundry worked sculptures do not. What’s the status of a maquette when that work is realised? When does a prop become a sculpture? What are the points of similarity and difference between Moore and Hepworth’s respective sculptural languages?
If you have any further questions, please email brimfieldmel@yahoo.co.uk
Download a copy of this invitation