Hot House

2022

Over four days in Woodend Gallery, Scarborough, for Crescent Arts, I worked collaboratively with a group of Sixth Form Art students. Influenced by the spaces history, light and drafts created by the amazing windows, we explored ideas, context, process and materials. Including once exotic plants such as the Potato (which is grown on mass locally to supply the McCain factory and chip shops) and Sebums which on their portable plinth acted as drip catchers when the due to be repaired original roof leaked.

We made, using seemingly exotic yet discarded plastics and foils recovered from a scrap store, a 46m inflatable vine like object that wove itself through the space, tiny and oversized flowers, a hanging wall of silver featuring strange tendril’s, a beautiful bird like costume suspended from a modern day perch and what we believe to be the regions largest potato print. By restricting ourselves to only 2 or 3 materials per object we challenged ourselves to work collaboratively and craft refined and bold sculptural pieces.

In the introduction I wrote: “I’ve thought about this glass gallery and how it was and is a hot house. A place where living parrots and terrapines were once displayed alongside natural history objects and dead stuffed animals. “Hothousing” is a term used in education, and I think of it as forcing – like rhubarb in the dark. It’s here I start, with notions of growth, change and transformation. Determined to make, alongside you students, work that is neither forced nor dead, but rather catalysts for your next step”.

Download the exhibitions interpretation text co-authoured with the group.

Thanks to:
Crescent Arts
Martha
Kyra

Students:
Millie
Emily
Mary
Nina
Monika
Rijanna
Scarlett.

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