SPATIAL RELATIONS , 2009
Spatial Relations is an interactive response to the built environment of Portlaoise town, it was created during the _UNIT Residency programme commissioned by Laoise County Council and curated by Sally Timmons and Sarah Searson.
Portlaoise is a town that has seen an explosion of residential building throughout the Celtic Tiger years. Currently the town is characterised by empty, unfinished housing estates and a lack of infrastructure to accommodate population increase that has been encouraged by decentralisation.
I was particularly interested in planning and planning maps for the town and the abstracted knowledge of a space that one gains from a map. The aesthetic of the window display was borrowed from the county council planning authority’s online maps. In the stop animation projected behind the model houses in Spatial Relations the evolving watercolour image loosely takes its form from the aerial view of Portlaoise further abstracting the map from the actual physical space.Running parallel to the theme of urban planning was that of the artistic process and an unveiling of the messy planning that goes into an artwork.At the open studio discussions with the local students in the former office space, I presented the work and a slideshow documenting the evolution of the Good Hatchery, these visits created a form for discussion surrounding alternative uses of space. Simultaneously these visits provided an audience for the messy internal workings of the window artwork. Internally the installation of the artwork had been intentionally haphazard with only batons of wood tacked onto the main structure to provide support, this ramshackle backdrop intended as a metaphor for the misdirection that led to the current physical state of the town.
More information on this project can be founds HERE
