The Self-Isolation Residency 19th may 2020: Day 51

Exploring Installation No. 7: 'Promontories': Trafford College Residency, 2011, Antony Clarkson

Tonight I'm returning to a piece of my situation specific installation work, in fact my to date my only permanent piece. Whilst I was in Ireland on my first artist residency I was in the process of applying for several other residencies to progress onto. Actually the first of these and the subject of tonight's piece didn't start off as a residency but it rapidly turned into one. Several years earlier I had completed my Art Foundation Course at Trafford College in Manchester; this is before progressing on to Manchester Art School. I was contacted by the marketing department of the college who had decided to run a completion open to all former students to design and install a permanent, new installation for their brand new main building. The award for the winner would be a cash prize to allow them to develop and install there vision into this new space. I promptly put together my proposal based on their commission brief and was delight to hear a few days later that mine was the winning entry.

My idea was based around the forms my spatial paintings, but to take these forms into a new, more sculptural direction. I also had to include a colour-scheme that was derived from the colleges logo and also to include, 'motivational' quotations from college staff and alumni. This turned out to be a very large scale project that would occupy my time for the 6 months immediately following my residency in Ireland. When I returned to the UK I immediately  began discussions with the college as to the logistics of the project and it was at this point that they decided to expand the project from being an award and commission to a full blown residency. The reasoning behind this was two fold, the first was the more pragmatic in that the scale of the work demanded that I have a much larger studio to work in and as the college had whole buildings empty at that time due to their expansion and redevelopment it made sense that I should take over one of these empty spaces to do my work in. The second reason was an offshoot from the first and was put forward by the art department who saw the possibilities that would be open to them to have a practicing artist on campus who could from time to time give talks, lectures and tutorials to their students.

In lots of ways the final piece, 'Promontories', is quite materials driven and proved to be a great testing ground for other similar projects that would around in the future. As I say the original commission required that I include certain colours and texts, but of which were easily and effectively achieved through the usage of wall panels spray painted in a form of 'graphic/graffiti' style. The bigger challenge came about with the ceiling mounted paintings/sculptures as through discussion with the new buildings architects and engineers it rapidly became apparent the structure of the space where the work was to be installed was not built with a structure substantially strong enough to support the weight of the original design. For me this literally meant back to the drawing board. I probably spent the first 2 months of the project exploring light weight alternative materials to my usual 'wood, canvas and oil paints'. However the outcome of this was a very positive solution which as I say lead directly to other pieces I was to complete for other commissions. The final sculpture are what I refer to as 'kites' as that is what they basically are; the wooden 'stretchers' or my spatial paintings are replaced with ultra light carbon-fibre poles and the canvas and paint, which on this scale would be extremely  heavy in its own right, is replaced with precoloured rip-stop sail cloth with I managed to source in the required colours for the project. The final piece was very satisfying on so many levels and it still is in place today.