Artwork chosen for town festival
FOUR quirky and thoughtprovoking art installations have been chosen to appear in next year’s Barnaby Festival.
Festival organisers challenged readers to come up with ideas for publicsited artworks under the theme ‘space’, and after much deliberation, have chosen four diverse concepts by Macclesfield artists.
Karl Wallace, Barnaby Festival director, said: “I am delighted that the festival is supporting the development of home-grown and Macc-based talent in this way. These four selected projects were stand-out.
“We asked for creative and ambitious interpretations of the theme – and that’s what we got. It is a significant step for Barnaby to commission Macclesfield artists and invest in their practice.”
The festival runs from June 17 to 26 next year.
The artwork will be funded with support from Arts Council England.
The selection panel – also comprising Kwong Lee, the director of Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, and members of the Barnaby Visual Arts Steering Group – unanimously selected the four winning proposals.
Tom Baskeyfield and Mario Popham’s ‘Shaped By Stone’ is a dual-site exhibition in Macclesfield and at Tegg’s Nose, working from stone logs and off-cuts at the abandoned quarry, plus walls, cobbles and flagstones from the town centre. Tom will make large-scale graphite embossings which will sit alongside Mario Popham’s large-format photographs of the two sites.
Hannah Wooll’s ‘Engaging With Spaces Through Objects’ will transform unwanted possessions found in Macclesfield’s charity shops into small-scale artworks to be displayed in the windowsills of six Macclesfield homes.
On this unconventional ‘art trail’ the viewer will peer into normally private indoor spaces and see the unique artworks.
Rachael King, Val Lear and Mark Helliwell’s ‘No Space Like Home’ multi-media installation looks at obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and its connections with hoarding behaviour. Rachael, who suffers from OCD, approached the artists to document the ‘decluttering’ process through photography and film.
And Simon Woolham will make a film, TakingBack-Space: The Macc Walks, to engage young and old by establishing a series of ‘memory walks’ around Macclesfield.
For more information about the festival or artists email press@barnabyfestival.org.uk