sleep shed
Sun, 29 Jun 2008
Commission: sleep shed
sleep shed is a site-specific work commissioned from recent graduate Callum Bell for installation (August 2008) in my small walled back garden at Admiralty House. I commissioned Callum on the day I saw his installation Home at the 2008 University of Plymouth Degree Shows. sleep shed will be both practical (an extra sleep area for houseguests), and a metaphor for sustainable creativity and the restorative power of slumber.
A temporary “habitable sculpture” coupled to the main house, sleep shed is a transformative space much like the sleeper carriages on the Night Riviera Sleeper train that transports me - asleep - twice a month from Paddington (London) to Plymouth. Sustainably sourced from found, ephemeral lengths of wood, sleep shed represents the transient, magical and fleeting world of a mobile night.
Background: Home
A large, polygonal, roofless structure, the main materials of Home are discarded lengths and sections of milled wood collected by the artist over months of foraging expeditions on his bike. The first thing the visitor sees is the raw wood exterior, braced and rigidly vertical as though it were the reverse of a theatrical stage set. But Home isn’t a scenic construction where fantasy is foremost, and the audience is not allowed to see what’s behind the constructed reality. Home reflects both the public and private side of home, but in reverse. The public face, i.e. the more “camera friendly” nuanced white space, is the interior. The exterior is the private “raw” side.
Visitors enter Home through reclaimed mullioned glass French doors. White radiators hang on the walls of the pale, neutral interior. One lies on the wood plank floor. The boundaries of each random length and shaped piece of wood are strengthened by shadows formed where each section abuts its neighbour. A small circular cut-out in one wall is a peep-hole from the outside-in and vice versa.
Although there are similarities, Callum Bell doesn’t suggest his forms are influenced by the habitable sculptures of Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe cycle, or the driftwood constructions of Margaret Mellis, or the ad hoc wood exteriors of 1970s-era adapted domestic geodesic domes. But he agrees his practice shifted from 2D to 3D to satisfy an urgent need to make substantive, sustainable objects. Dubuffet felt this same urge. He abandoned the limitations of the plane to create stand-alone structures. He wanted to inhabit his images.
Frank Stella believes “no art is any good unless you can feel how it’s put together”. sleep shed slumberers will soon feel - literally - how Callum Bell puts his art together. Check back for updates and details of the opening.
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