Inside the weave

Laura Ellen Bacon is artist in residence at Compton Verney, and is creating a wonderful white tape cocoon among the interstices of some trees in the Capability Brown park. The work seems quite different from the woven forms she has previously produced: there is no inherent strength in the material, so the smooth inner compartment (an implied shell or nest?) is literally held in place by the tension of a multitude of tied lengths of tape, using the trees as anchoring points.

Starting off as straight lines, they are tensioned into curves by further attached strips in a way that is not dissimilar to the use of control points on bezier curves in type design. This results in a certain randomness from the outside, as the smooth internal effect is most clearly seen when you actually enter the structure – it’s big enough for two people to stand in comfortably. The work will last a season – perhaps more? Today it was the home of a young robin and a mouse (who did not stay around to be photographed).

More images here.

Digital focus

I’m looking forward to reading Sophie Goldsworthy’s new Rough Guide to Digital Photography. Look for the lovely images of Tuscany and Indian tea plantations on her website here.

Berating your client

Following on from the brief we’d all like to have received, here is the letter of desperation to the client that we’ve all probably composed in our head, but never sent. Augustus Pugin did send this letter, though, when his client had the temerity to suggest the addition of a gallery (a solecism in a Gothic church):

‘… here are no Less than 5 protestant archdeacons pulling down galleries of every kind, all the works of the Camden & oxford societies denounce them & now after I had ingeniously got rid of the organ Monstrosity your lordship proposes to erect a gallery in the only perfect revival that has been accomplished. what Can I say or do, the gallery would not hold 20 people if crammed full & it would utterly ruin the church. all the Learned men will flock to this church as a Model & then they will see this Monstrosity. what a miserable fate awaits every architect of this wretched country. I have Lived to see almost every building on which I have set my heart either upset or ruined & now a gallery at Cheadle. perfect Cheadle. Cheadle my consolation in all my afflictions. Mercy I entreat.’

Pugin’s client relented. The gallery was not built.

Rosemary Hill, God’s architect: Pugin and the building of romantic Britain (London, 2007) p. 268