Design Festivals
Curious & Curiouser
Responding to the brief “The Playful City”, working with my colleagues at FCBStudios, I curated a series of installations across Fitzrovia exploring the idea of Lewis Carroll’s famous line “Curious and Curiouser”, where nothing is quite what is seems.
Using only cardboard, sound, and light, the installations took people by surprise in the street or intrigued people in the gallery, inviting them to think about scale and the city in playful and inspiring ways.
The installations included games to encourage young people to interact with their neighbourhood, a riff on the idea of the skyscraper and, my firm favourite, Matrix: a dynamic screen formed from over 2,500 cardboard tubes, packed not glued, from ceiling to floor and column to door frame. Like so many lenses, this screen offered endless perspectives and dimensions as tubes could be pushed to form different shapes and patterns while the screen itself remained intact.
Power in Space
A multi-sensory, experimental festival exploring how important cultural buildings – religious, political, cultural – adapt to the changes in what society demands of them.
Sound, light, and voice were all used to invite people to experience the ancient stones in a sensory way, exploring the resonance of voice moving around the building.
Working with textile artist Caroline Broadhead, we expressed the magnificent fan-vaulted ceiling of the Abbey by installing a canopy of fine taut lines across part of the nave just above the heads of the participants. Caroline’s idea was to “make the division of low and high, earth and heaven an insubstantial stratum”. The lines were both there and not there, made present when catching the light, expressing an ordinary ceiling height, and thus making a dynamic connection between the everyday and the extraordinary.
Touch / Don’t Touch
As a kid I would trail behind my parents as we visited historic houses across the land, and I always wished I could jump over those admonishing red velvet ropes to curl up with tea and scones in front of the fire.
During a travel scholarship funded by the Churchill Fellowship and the British Council I travelled to the USA and Europe in 2015 to explore the tensions inherent in museums and galleries who want to connect with audiences but need also to keep them at a distance to protect precious objects from too many curious fingers.
Following this research I wrote a book and created an exhibition which playful wanders across the rocky terrain between permission and prohibition that museums have to navigate.
Playing on the iconic New York crossing signal “WALK/DON’T WALK”, transposed to express this tension of “TOUCH/DON’T TOUCH”. The focal point is ‘Détente’, a textile maze of red ropes dangling from the ceiling that invites people to immerse themselves in the very fabric that ordinarily presents a barrier between them and the historic rooms or precious paintings they are supposed to admire.
