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2/11/2003

Janice Kerbal

Norwich Gallery, Norwich

Home Climate Gardens

A collaboration with The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, a cross-disciplinary centre that researches the consequences of climate change and options for responding.
Funded by Arts Council of England East, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Arts Council England East, Canadian High Commission Norfolk County Council and Norwich City Council.

There is a contradiction at the centre of our relationship to climate change. We have utopian desires but they are undermined by dystopian habits. The natural environment is threatened by the built one. Our love of nature is in conflict with our desire for a modern metropolitan lifestyle with cleanliness, warmth, refrigeration, light, mobility, entertainment and communication.

Our complicity in the contradictions between desires and habits is where the idea of Adaptive Design has defined recent innovations in architecture. How can we work with people's desires for utopian habitats to unlock the paradox at the centre of our relationship to the fundamental issues of climate change?

The climate of the future remains unclear to science and society, a result of growing greenhouse gas emissions and human influence. A humid bathroom may offer the same climatic conditions as an island in the South Pacific without the risk of extreme weather events and coastal erosion; similarly, the climate of a central-heated office block is akin to a fragile desert habitat. Recent studies by NASA on the benefits of plants for use in space stations indicate that interior planting can provide inexpensive, low-tech, eco-friendly means for removing pollutants from the home and workplace. Home Climate Gardens is both an allegorical and performative meditation on the future conditions of a world marked by increasingly uncertain environmental conditions.

At this moment in time, people are isolated from their natural environment. Even under threat, nature continues to be seen as a metaphor. Individual plants come together in a garden to make new communities. Plants come from all over the world and are bred as hybrids to grow in new and different climates. There is the theoretical possibility that human habitats might become a refuge for threatened species of plants. We are surrounded by pictures of plants but cannot feel the heat from a tropical image, nor smell the perfume of a photograph. Janice Kerbel has taken the 'logic of nature' and followed it to make a work of art.

The drawings in the exhibition are a series of unique garden plans developed for a range of indoor environments by considering the range of plants that might thrive in each of the studied architectural and climatic condition:
1. Student Housing - bookshelf garden
2. 7th Floor Council Flat - wall-mounted gardens
3. Victorian Terrace House - seasonal bay-window garden
4. Loft Conversion - mobile garden
5. Gallery Garden for the Norwich Gallery
6. Open Plan Office (Tyndall Centre HQ) - modular wall garden
7. Launderette - hanging garden
8. Gym -respiration gardens
9. Pub - pint-sized garden (to be confirmed)
10. 76th story communications tower revolving restaurant - revolving garden

Home climate gardens will be accompanied by a full-colour calendar for 2004. The calendar will be distributed to all secondary schools in East Anglia and to the institutions taking part in the Tyndall Project. Please send your name and address to the Norwich Gallery or email if you would like to receive a copy.

Janice Kerbel's work often takes the form of a 'plan' or 'study', Kerbel's work is generated out of the rigorous application and interrogation of existing systems or logics in order to explore the relationship between reality, imagined ideals, and illusions. Recent works include: Bank Job (2000), a cohesive plan for robbing a central London City bank; 15 Lombard St Bookworks, 2001, an artist book that examines the working of the bank and the plan for its heist in exhaustive detail; Home Fittings (1999-2002), a series of drawings and site-specific installations that propose ways of dealing with the anxieties of the built environment; Home Conjuring Unit (2000), a set of plans for the construction and assemblage of a multifunctional domestic magician's cabinet; The Bird Island Project (2000-03), a web-, sound-, text- and print-based project that explores and develops the notion of paradise over a number of works; and Studies for Small Islands (2003), a series of drawings that imagine the vegetation of a number of small fictional islands from a range of habitats to construct abstract realities in scientific detail. Jennifer Higgie discusses Kerbel's work in frieze Sept. 2003.

Tyndall Centre's headquarters are located at the University of East Anglia, with regional offices at UMIST, Manchester and the University of Southampton. At the core of the Tyndall Centre are nine leading Universities and Research Institutes throughout the UK. The Tyndall Centre is funded by three research councils (NERC, EPSRC and ESRC) with support from the DTI.

Opening Saturday 1 November 1 to 3pm
3 November to 12 December 2003

Lynda Morris or Andrew Hunt at the Norwich Gallery NSAD St George Street Norwich NR3 1BB. Tel. +44 0 1603 610561

Asher Minns Communication Manager Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Tel: +44 0 1603 593906

Norwich Gallery
Norwich School of Art and Design
St Georges Street
Norwich
NR3 1BB
direct line tel +44 (0)1603 756 247

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