17/6/2005
Two exhibitions
firstsite, Colchester
Lisa Cheung: Pique Nique. The artist introduces 3 imaginative new garden features to promote sitting, drinking and eating in the secluded garden of the Minories Art Gallery. Her mobile kitchen will be taken around town, her elaborate fountain will be available for hire. Bettina Furnee: If you are ever in the area. Fear of invasion forms the basis of the exhibition and a series of related offsite projects.
Lisa Cheung
Pique Nique
18 June – 27 July 2005
For her exhibition at firstsite artist Lisa Cheung intends to create the perfect outdoor experience. She introduces three imaginative new garden features to promote sitting, drinking and eating in the secluded garden of the Minories Art Gallery: the Georgian town house inhabited by firstsite.
Her mobile kitchen will be taken around town, her elaborate fountain will be available for hire and a series of interlocking floor cushions offered for use by firstsite’s visitors.
These remarkable objects will be installed inside the building and are ‘self-serve’; visitors are invited to borrow them for personal use, to participate and enjoy themselves individually and collectively, as well as led by the artist.
Sitting: a set of interlocking cushions that can be used singly or arranged to suit the shape and dynamic of any group. These can be used informally for sitting in the garden or servicing planned group activities or meetings.
Drinking: a mobile ‘water feature’, created from an assemblage of various drinking vessels and common household objects that can be wheeled into the garden for special occasions. It can be used as a drinking fountain, filled with various thirst quenching drinks for parties and events – available for hire.
Eating: a mobile soup kitchen that will be taken to different locations throughout Colchester and used as the basis for a performative piece where a meal (soup) will be cooked on location by the artist and participants, then shared with passers-by!
Cheung is interested in extending personal space in a public sphere; the often intimate activities of cooking and drinking are here transferred out of doors, to a large open space.
She has a reputation for bringing people together in shared social and creative activity. Through seemingly simple tasks and actions, she cleverly involves and engages people in her sophisticated and highly innovative projects: straightforward paper flower making or cooking noodles become major cross-generational performances, installations and social fests!
We look forward to seeing what happens when Lisa Cheung arrives in Colchester.
---
Bettina Furnee
If you are ever in the area
18 June – 23 July 2005
Fear of invasion forms the basis of firstsite’s latest exhibition and a series of related offsite projects, If Ever You're in the Area, developed by Cambridge-based artist Bettina Furnée.
Ongoing, site-specific works on the Suffolk Coast are complemented by gallery works that explore similarities between differing forms of invasion, militaristic and environmental. The encroachment of the sea eroding the cliffs stands alongside the threat of wartime landings.
Known nationally as a letter cutter and public artist, this exhibition presents seven new gallery pieces that take Bettina’s practice into new territories. While carved text continues to play an integral role, she launches into ambitious sculpture, installation, photography, film and web-casting.
Ideas around fear of attack and rituals of commemoration are explored in small-scale, ephemeral arrangements of objects. Ambiguous titles invite contemplation: Beachhead, Lines of Defence, Plain Sailing, Beached, Lost on the beach and It's a free country.
“The works consider some of the customs and rites we have devised to endorse and protect ourselves and our morality at important moments of change.â€
Bettina Furnée
The literary content in her work is often created in collaboration with local communities, poets and writers. For If Ever You're in the Area she has worked with writers Simon Frazer and Tony Mitton to create phrases like: “Submission is Advancing at a Frightful Speedâ€, for the offsite work Lines of Defence.
Each letter was given a flag and each flag planted, in order, into the cliff near the military defences at Bawdsey, Suffolk. As the cliffs eroded the flags were taken with them, letter by letter, the truncated words flapping above the remains of the crumbling fortifications. Documented via a live web images, 15-minute updates recorded the changing coastline, and the disappearing text.
If Ever You're in the Area unites the Dutch coastline near the artist’s childhood home, The Hague, Holland and Bawdsey, Suffolk on the other side of the North sea - both studded with bunkers, marking historical boundaries between free and once occupied land.
Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the work has wide appeal, using obsolete military defences along the coast, from the Napoleonic period to the 1940’s, for inspiration and location.
Visit the project website for more information/images: http://www.ifever.org.uk
Bettina has worked independently as a letter cutter and public artist since 1989, producing site specific and text based work, mostly made to commission and resulting in permanent pieces within the built environment, such as Victoria Square, Birmingham 1993.
If Ever You Are In The Area was supported by Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts
Other elements of the If Ever You Are In The Area project:
Bawdsey Visitor Days
26 June, 10, 24 July, 28, 29 August 2005 12pm - 4pm
Exhibition at Naze Tower
10 June - 16 July 2006
Presenting evolving pieces from the firstsite exhibition and other site specific artworks
---
firstsite
the minories art gallery
74 High Street
Colchester
Essex CO1 1UE