A weekend of site-specific projects for Cannizaro Park
by students of Wimbledon College of Art
10th-11th March 2012
10am – 5pm Saturday, 10am – 5:30pm Sunday
Fitness, variety, simplicity, regularity, intricacy and quantity are six terms that apply to PARK TWELVE as a whole. Specifically, Victoria Grenier has taken them from Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, and used them as the basis from which to judge her competition with a prize awarded for the most beautiful stick found within the park during the event. Julia Villard and Georgia Dennison also referred to eighteenth-century ideals, with Julia staging a picnic within the cultivated arcadia of Cannizaro’s Italian Garden and Georgia building a deer shelter facade reminiscent of those typically built in picturesque parks of the period. The structure of Nancy Allen’s Vedute supported a series of drawings that were made during the course of the weekend, with each one framing a carefully composed view. Josefina Nelimarkka’s plein air paintings took their shape rather than their subject from their surroundings, with swathes of starched, painted canvas occupying the length of the garden’s pergola.
With an emphasis on artifact rather than artifice, Rebecca Burrow’s arrangement of plumbing fragments suggested a fictitious archaeology. Aniano Areco’s hung clothes and shoes invoked an absent individual, while Thea Von Mantripp and Vito Walker’s cut-out drawings boldly reinterpreted several of the park’s memorial statues. Karen Pearson’s Habitat became a fantastical shelter on a human scale, built from found materials with the logic of a Bower Bird. In contrast, Demelza and Ezra Watts proposed a skyscraper to rival the Shard. Their large-scale model and site office acted as this year’s exhibition pavilion.
Natural and material processes were employed elsewhere. Cuthbert Noble’s carbonised plant remains were scattered within woodland, and Anna Litchfield infused each visitor’s map with the smoke from burnt herbs. Sophie Wall’s plaster slabs were cast from domestic textiles, their floral patterns inverted as ghostly reliefs. Jay Delves’s Constraints series contained human volunteers subjugated by their awkward forms. Kanako Inokuchi presented casts of the underneath of arched feet. This was nestled in the ground beside a tree, with an accompanying white wax cast floating in the pond.
PARK TWELVE culminated in an afternoon reception on Sunday March 11th. By this point, Demelza and Ezra Watts’s model was constructed, and Nancy Allen’s drawing series completed. Victoria Grenier awarded the prize for her competition and Julia Villard staged her picnic event during the reception.
PARK is an annual event which has been hosted by Wimbledon College of Art in Cannizaro Park since the 1970s. Wimbledon College of Art would like to thank Merton Council for their generous support and assistance again this year.
PARK TWELVE was curated by Juliet Haysom.
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