Artists in Neighbourhood at Flax Art Project Space
Monday 28th March - Friday 1st April 2022
In March 2022, Household took up residence in Flax Art Project Space for a week, where we officially launched our new public realm project Artists in Neighbourhoods. We invited funders, stakeholders and potential partners to the launch and presentation of the proposals, with a public opening in the evening.
The Artists in Neighbourhoods proposals will form a case study that will hopefully inform public art policy in the city. We recognise that current commissioning processes almost always exclude the wealth of excellent contemporary artists who live and work here, whether from the prescriptive, closed briefs that often are little more than corporate embellishing; or through the expectation of the applicant to have a very specific skill set in order to singlehandedly deliver a largescale public art work. With Artists in Neighbourhoods, we placed emphasis on an initial research and design period to ensure workable, realistic proposals are created. We have been working with four artists over the last year to develop proposals for neighbourhoods in the city which we will use as case studies for realising and testing our method of working in Belfast. We aim that these case studies and the research around the work can inform public art policy within Northern Ireland.
Jan McCullough has been working with the Hogg and Welch archive photography collection held by Ulster museum as a starting point for her project. These archival photographs document Belfast’s industrial settings and wares and Jan is particularly interested in the archive’s more surreal images, the structures behind displays and the methods by which they photographed the objects. For Jan’s Reassembly proposal she wants to isolate and re-present some of the images from this archive back into the public spaces and sites of their original locations, in order to tell a new story of Belfast’s material history.
For this proposal, Pi Wrong for Belfast, Michael Hanna started with idea of Pi – a mathematical equation of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi has a rich history of calculation mistakes and approximations going back to the beginnings of civilisation including the Egyptians and Babylonians. It has evolved, changed with the most recent calculation of Pi sitting at 62.8 trillion digits from August 2021. The idea of Pi exists in dialogue with the current pieces of public art in Belfast, with almost all featuring circles and spheres prominently. For his new work he wants to create a large scale sculpture of the first 9 digits of Pi but with one digit wrong. This will be an error on a massive stage, proposed for a rooftop site to be seen across the city of Belfast.
Brown&Brí’s exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky is a temporary floating structure on the top lake at the Waterworks Park in north Belfast. As people walk around the lake, the structure cuts a smooth black ellipse through the surface of the water. At one point on the circuit the viewer can step down to a jetty where, from this view point, the elliptical dimensions foreshorten to form a perfect circle, punching a black hole through the vertical plane of the landscape. The project is rooted in the idea that, at a quantum level, what we see when we look at an object is fundamentally different to what it is when we’re not looking at it. The piece strives towards this impossible ‘observation without seeing’, and aims to create a point of departure from observable reality, however brief and illusory.
