St Basil's, 2021
This project was awakened by the eccentric relationship public urban sculpture has to its setting. Often initiated in historical circumstances, particular sites in cities evolve into locations of significance to the community. It may start with a key heritage building as the anchor with subsequent architecture of civic ambition rounding out the spatial organization. Considered landscape architecture follows, acting as connective fabric between the buildings. Once the site’s importance in the social and cultural life of the city is established a work of substantive public art may well appear in the middle of it all.
Each of these elements - architecture, landscape, art - communicates their cultural message in the visual language of their era. Like all language, the meaning of each of these messages is reinterpreted, lost, or endures intact through subsequent generations. It is this eclectic assembly of components and time frames that provokes enduring curiosity in me.
As I repeatedly return to these sites a growing dichotomy or tension develops between two narratives. I am initially drawn in by the first, a conversation between the individual parts some of whom may perhaps be a little surprised at who they ended up neighbours with. But inevitably I begin to hear that of the aggregate whole which engages the broader city and its inhabitants on the question of civic history and identity.
Sample Works:
NGC, 2021
UoT (1), 2021
Gardiner, 2021
UoT (2), 2021
BoC, 2021
