sculpture network start'18 in Isle of Wight, United Kingdom: The Bunker

PROGRAMME:

Exhibit: ‘BUILDING’, Lisa Traxler & Karen Karen

‘Building’ is an installation of work in response to the Sculpture Network’s theme for 2018 of ‘Sculpture and Architecture’. Recent sculptural work by both artists will be selected and juxtaposed collaboratively within the setting of the original exposed concrete blast walls of  ‘the Bunker’, as a core exhibit for the Start ’18 event. ‘Building’ will explore shared commonalities between the processes, forms and materiality of both sculpture and architecture.

In the assembled ‘Cairn’ works by Karen Karen, primal constructive and sculptural/marker-making instincts are at play with the remains of battles lost between the built environment and the natural elements. Constructed using an assortment of modern-day letter filing trays and locally found, sea worn concrete beach ‘rocks’, sea worn tarmac from land slipped car parks, and also smoothed Victorian house bricks - all reduced and reformed by their immersion and interaction with the sand and sea.

Lisa Traxler’s sculptural and installation works are a development of her painting practice and in part, her time collaborating with her architect partner Lincoln Miles in creating their home(s) and combined studio spaces. Lisa’s sculptural input for the Bunker dwelling itself includes vertical perforated exterior ‘fins’ and a floating staircase – both an abstracted narrative of dazzle camouflage constructed with CNC cut solid paper composite.

For the installation for Start ’18, Traxler’s 3D works will preview sculptures also recently developed in response to the Bunker. Including ‘The Beauty Chorus’, a series made with vitreous enamelled steel; lightly interlocking fragmented compositions that slot and interact together, appearing to have been lifted from a blueprint of a technical drawing documenting a secret architectural design.

Programme Details:

11.00am onwards,    ‘Building’ installation by Lisa Traxler & Karen Karen.
11.30am      sculpture network’s introductory video screening.
12:00am onwards    Live photo wall projection of all 90+ venues taking part.
1.30pm    Short walk and talk with architect Lincoln Miles and artist Lisa Traxler discussing aspects of The Bunker project.
2.30pm    Short talk + Q & A with artists Lisa Traxler and Karen Karen.
3.00pm    Networking.
4.00pm    End.
 

The Bunker project is a new dwelling completed early in 2017 that connects, responds and expresses a narrative with a former WWII Concrete Radar Bunker and the surrounding coastal ‘Undercliff’ landscape. The result of a partnering by artist Lisa Traxler RWS MRBS and award winning architect Lincoln Miles.

After its service, from 1941 until it became non-operational in 1947, the concrete bunker was left to deteriorate and became derelict. Both hidden and exposed, this strikingly monumental brutalist edifice sits on a plateau connecting abstractly with an undulating and restless landscape, ragged outcrops of gorse alongside weather worn strata. The project identifies with these contextual narratives through the visual aesthetic of secrecy, encrypted code and camouflage.

The new architecture is inserted and interwoven into the existing structure leaving the historic fabric (raw concrete) completely intact and uncontaminated as a volume.

Download direction (PDF)