 River Droplet installation. CREDIT: Amanda Moore ‘River Droplet’ is a temporary installation in Frampton, Dorset, that shines a light on the unique character of chalk streams in Dorset, due to open for the month of September 2024. This project follows on from the installation I completed at Canute's Palace, Southampton, in 2018. This involved hanging 1,000 bottles of water from the Solent in a wave formation from a scaffold structure. The installation referenced narratives around Canute who was said to have demonstrated that no man can hold back the tide. The bottles displayed the clay sediment found in the Solent and interestingly, brought water into the town in an area which would have belonged to the sea, this area of the Old Town being reclaimed land. The installation was activated by a series of events and performances as it allowed full use of the ground floor of the palace below and many events related to water and seafaring. River Droplet has has been commissioned by Dorset National Landscape as the first installation for the 'Sitting Spaces' project. Sitting Spaces aims to encourage a wider range of people to visit the countryside by creating temporary structures to sit and enjoy the special qualities of the area. Sitting Spaces supports the new Dorset Food Trail, which highlights the food heritage of the Frome Valley between Maiden Newton and Dorchester. The brief was to design a sitting space which highlights local geological properties of an area and relate them to food production. This encouraged me to think about the project I did in Southampton as part of a possible series, rather than a one-off. This is a new way of working for me and shows that you can often do something once, and then disregard its potential value in a different context. This installation consists of 600 bottles of water taken from the adjacent River Frome. The chalky bed of the river can be seen through the sediment in each of the bottles. Chalk streams are perfect for the production of watercress which is grown locally and shipped around the UK and across the world. It is also giving me an opportunity to work with an artist I've wanted to work with for a while, Lorna Rees of Gobbledegook Theatre, https://www.gobbledegooktheatre.com/. Lorna is bringing the installation to life with events and recordings that explore the story of watercress production and what makes chalk streams so special. She is crafting songs based on folk songs about watercress, recording audio from people including scientists and growers, and we are holding 'glow-mings' where we celebrate sunset and the illumination of the installation. Audio can be played via QR codes online. Pretty much every town and city in the UK has been created around a river and each river tells a different story. This model of showcasing the water, slowing creating a physical installation which the local community grow interest in, and activating it by telling stories, is proving to to form an interesting and valuable model for outdoor art. https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/sitting-spaces/  Canute's Palace, Southampton. CREDIT: Amanda Moore
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 CREDIT: Richard Chivers. Gosport Mural, Amanda Moore 2022 Over the last two years I’ve been creating more public artwork using vinyl printing rather than hand paint or applying art traditionally. The process goes like this…design an artwork which is site-specific for the client, (usually local authority), approach a vinyl printing company to survey the site accurately and quote for the work, have them print and install the final work like outdoor wallpaper. I’ve used adhesive wraps for three types of installation:
The advantage of using a vinyl printing subcontractor is speed. I tend to mock up artwork using Adobe Illustrator mostly using vector-based lines and shapes which cuts out concerns over image resolution. I then approach a subcontractor I’ve worked with previously and ask them to measure on site and quote for the work, plus provide a method statement detailing how they will install safely and any product warranties. I’ll often have a sample installed on the site so that we can see how the material will stretch over textures such as brickwork and how easily it is removed.  CREDIT: Amanda Moore. Testing vinyl wrap. The project I worked on in collaboration with Studio BAD in Gosport in 2022 involved designing a wrap for a snooker hall building as part of a trail of new art within the town centre. I designed a mural which picked up on Goport’s naval heritage by taking dazzle boat painting patterns and combined this with colours and motifs seen on heritage buildings around the town. All of this was drawn in Adobe Illustrator and sent to Mac Signs based in Southampton who installed the work using a scaffold tower within a week, although this week of labour was spread out around poor weather.  CREDIT: Amanda Moore. Eastleigh translucent vinyls In Eastleigh I designed a large set of translucent vinyls which were based on Art Deco patterns seen on an early twentieth century building in the town. These were installed to glazed colonnades and create reflections onto the ground. The prints were cut around the unevenly spaced mullions on site rather than needing to measure each piece of glass. The works were installed to the underside around the town, bird poop not landing on top.  CREDIT: Richard Chivers. Southampton Guildhall urban rug. For Southampton’s Guildhall Square an urban rug was formed using coloured squares made from recyclable aluminium. These squares were arranged as pixels forming architectural motifs on the Guildhall building. The texture for floor art is important in terms of guaranteed slip resistance in public areas. These didn’t quite hold up as well with the local skateboarders and they tore at the edges but it worked well as a temporary installation.
 CREDIT: Collage: Amanda Moore, Serpentine Pavilion 2013, Sou Fujimoto Buildings are permanent right? A naive friend once asked me whether architects would always have work because ‘they must have built all the buildings by now’. I studied architecture after studying fine arts in order to be involved in physical projects which would be more permanent than fine art, in terms of their longevity and relevance. Surely they would therefore also be more important and impactful? Art seemed to be more transient based on trends and what was popular for collectors and galleries. But is architecture and building design permanent? Should it be? Most clients expect at least 150 years of useful life from a building which is costing them several millions to construct. We raise floor levels above flood levels, with allowances for climate change, and carry out copious coordination exercises with materials and system providers. Maybe buildings can last at least this long and this length of time can be considered ‘permanent’. Victorian residential properties are popular in the UK and are well looked after by each generation of custodian. But should many non-residential buildings, such as commercial buildings, public buildings and temporary accommodation, be permanent? A commercial building designed with enough solidity, and embodied carbon, to last hundreds of years may not be wanted after forty. If building uses often change, perhaps the structural frame should always be designed to be flexible and reusable. This might be easier to achieve with traditional building technologies such as steel or concrete frame, but not for more sustainable technologies such as cross-laminated timber which may not allow flexibility in glazing or internal wall positions. There has been an obvious trend for temporary architecture in recent years including pop-up retail, outdoor event spaces and urban parklets. This feels to have grown during 2020 with a need to utilise more outdoor spaces due to reduced permitted indoor occupancy during the pandemic. Temporary architecture allows the proposed use of a place to be introduced and tested by communities before more expensive built interventions, and accepts flexibility and community input. It can also be free to be of its time, trendy in colour or form. It doesn’t have to be timeless. Maybe the design life of 'temporary architecture' can be extended from the length of a single event to the length of a tenure.  CREDIT: Photo: Dinesh Mehta, Kumbh Mehla Festival set up with temporary walls and floors Can humans expect any of our interventions to be permanent?Is this wishful thinking as a kind of immortal legacy? When I worked for a large practice in London, the partners were always excited by projects which involved masterplanning where a developer had procured several plots of land as new street networks and proposed uses could be developed which they felt would likely have greater longevity than the individual buildings. Aside from building use, building standards often change and old buildings may not be able to be upgraded to ‘current’ standards. Questionable quality is another issue which can counteract the designed mass and solidity of buildings. There are unfortunately many instances where architect-designed buildings are not weathered well and it’s a (short) matter of time before they decay when all the mastic fails. This often seems to come down to confusion between the role of the architect and the contractor and who will take responsibility for the final detailing. And so is architecture more or less permanent than art?Artworks may be protected for millennia if they constitute an important financial or cultural commodity. Public art could also potentially have a longer life span than a building. A public art project I was fortunate to work on, Black Down Stone Circle, Dorset, was installed in 2016. It consists of five totems produced from local Forest Marble stone. The totems align with true north and the summer and winter solstice sunrise and sunset positions specific to the site. Sunlight passes through openings in the totems and hits a central Portland standing stone. The project was built by a skilled stone mason called Tom Trouton and the alignment was advised by specialist Simon Banton. It is now used as a ceremonial site by spiritual groups on the solstices.  CREDIT: Photo: Simon Banton, Black Down Stone Circle Contrary to my expectations at the beginning of my architectural studies, a built project like this may prove to have more permanence than most architectural projects I've worked on in terms of physically being there and being relevant. The sculpture is robust and well-built by a craftsperson rather than relying on the integrity of foil tapes and membranes. The artistic idea does not age or need to be updated in line with any style or technical standards.
These days it seems more appropriate to me that art can have permanence but architecture should be more temporary.  CREDIT: Photo taken at Bedford Place, Southampton, of artist decorated road closure blockades, but what now happens behind?: Amanda Moore Since the pandemic started early this year, people have been forced to become more ‘local’. Working from home, (which I’ve now been doing for 9 months), no distant holidays, less inessential travel. Strangely, there have been some potential upsides to this new way of living which could point the path to a more permanent way of simplifying our lives and making us more rooted in our local environment, for the better. For myself, being housebound has made me more appreciative of my home and garden space and forced me to look at ways of optimising small areas of space. I’ve created a reading nook in the hallway and densified storage, as a posed to thinking about extending or buying a bigger home. I’ve gotten to know my neighbours better, we’ve set up benches in our driveways and had lunchtime coffees. I’ve cycled around during the one hour of government-approved daily exercise to scope out parks and woodland cycle routes I didn’t know about and people seemed to make more eye contact and smile more that usual during the summer, enjoying any level of human contact. Within town centres, some roads were closed in order to allow shops and cafes the opportunity to spread out into the streets due to restrictions on internal occupancy. In my own town, the two main Victorian streets have been closed since July which has not only removed the traffic, but also the linear barricades formed from parked cars which prevented people moving from one side of the street to the other in a more organic way. Both streets are served by back alleyways in any case and there is nearby accessible parking. The last few months of reduced car access has likely had little effect on trade, more the ‘inessential trade’ restrictions or general increase in online shopping pre-COVID. However, the streets have had an eerie silence where the white and yellow road markings remain and people are still not used to waking down the middle of the streets. This is an opportunity though, to rethink whether cars should be allowed into every street of our small town centres, making way for people to have a slower and more friendly retail experience, meandering down streets rather than driving to a shop and leaving, or driving out of town to bigger malls and hyper markets. Using the streets between shops as pop-up markets, weaving a garden through the town, having additional seating or events spaces sits in line with a retail ‘experience’ which has more physical interaction and connection with our local towns, and ties in with encouraging less car use and carbon reduction.  CREDIT: Photo, Romsey Parklet: Mill Road Summer Architects, designers and planners should be starting with the smaller traditions and rituals of each community such as yearly events, or seeking out local makers and performers who could benefit from having a public platform. Asking people what they want and making temporary and flexible interventions in line with those potential users, introducing a new use for road and parking spaces so that people can see the benefits and feed in ideas. A bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one which usually involves building large permanent interventions without ensuring that people are actually going to use them.
I currently have the opportunity of working with teams on a couple of these town centre projects, walking the streets and talking to local traders and groups about how to make the space around their business or studio more of a transitionary zone, ie; a parklet in front of a restaurant, a selling space in front of a workshop, a market stall for traders who sell in several towns, an activity or event space for local school or theatre groups ... all of this making the market street potentially more of an experience which draws people in as an alternative to online or out of town shopping... Go [or stay] local. |
AuthorWhat am I doing here? I'm collecting sea water to fill 1,000 bottles and hang them from a scaffold inside an old ruin. Why? Why not? Archives
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