The Self-Isolation Residency 8th may 2020: Day 40

Exploring Installation No. 5: 'Pilgrimage': “Workhouse Exhibition”, The Hive, Manchester, 2011, Antony Clarkson

''As I mentioned previously I'm going to be keeping these new posts about the Self-Isolation Residency broken up by reflections upon my older work, at this stage particularly Sculpture and installation work. So tonight we return to my semi-regular series about my situation specific installations with 'Pilgrimage'  which was commissioned for the “Workhouse Exhibition" at Art Council England's Hive Building in Manchester. The exhibition was conceived and curated by Manchester based artist Naomi Lethbridge who selected a group of artist, of which I was one, and asked them to create new art to follow the theme of the Manchester worker Bee with the below, simple brief:

“Work on a theme of intensive labour.”

Curator: Naomi Lethbridge.

'The work is to be exhibited at the appropriately named Hive building in April 2011.'

Upon visiting the space I was immediately taken by its size, its industrial/retail feel and the small areas of “hazard tape” that was already present in the space. The linear nature of this tape made me begin to think about the way tape of this kind is used to guide people in their usage of a space and make them aware of its nature, the presence of steps etc. It also made me consider the rigid hexagonal forms of the beehive. It was whilst considering these things that I came up with the idea of creating a traditional Labyrinth in the space but creating it out of hazard tape in reference to the tape that preexisted there.

The Labyrinth is often thought of as a maze, but actually it refers to a unicursal, single-path, as opposed to a maze which is multicursal, has numerous branching paths. In British and Western European (French)  tradition the Labyrinth was walked by the devout as an alternative to going on a Holy pilgrimage which few people could afford to do. The idea was that the labour of walking the Labyrinth would concentrate the mind upon God.

In this installation I chose to create a feeling of ambiguity in the mind of the observer; I wanted the nature of the Labyrinth to be suggested, but I also wanted the strong industrial, linear feeling of the shape and material to come through and so to this end the piece was deliberately aged, intentionally adding a question mark to its nature and provenance. Was it the work of one of the artists created for the exhibition? Or was it a functional form, created by a labourer and left over from the space’s previous incarnation.