Leo Fitzmaurice
 

Leo Fitzmaurice

My interest in Art Gene

A visit to any gallery one is faced with the gallery's relationship to regeneration in the surrounding area. With Art Gene this is a facet that is postitively highlighted and responded to as part of the programme. A tour around Barrow's  bleak charms was, for me, an oddly uplifting expierience. Like Liverpool, Barrow seems far bigger than it needs to be, and similarly it appears to be spread quite thinly. I got an odd sense that it was going bald. Not suprisingly, a memory of recent losses here seem to overide potential for developments. Perversely all new developments bring with them a fear of loss and this is particularly true in Barrow where subtraction rather than addition looks like the mostly likely starting point. For me though, this point, the potential for removal rather than addition, is precisely what I find interesting.

What I am trying to achieve

My work has recently been concerned with materials/structures that hold information and, in particularly, in the public realm, the reworking of materials that exists within this realm. Walking around Barrow I became aware of 'for sale' boards many that had been up so long they had started to fade.  I was interested, in particular, in the way these objects' only function is to hold up words. A wooden frame and sturdy correx board to hold up half a dosen words - what if these frames were put to another use? - that of an actual construction material for a dwelling rather than an advert for one?  Once the material has been stipped of its original textual message it could surely function as something else - a unit for an eccentric modular design - Could i actually construct 'architecture' from an object that was primarily functioned as information? The resulting structure, if possible at all, was bound to be rickerty and hand made and would be more likely to reference a post appocaliptic version of survival, a shanty town shack, rather than the glossy future promised by regeneration brochure.

 

 

 

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