Artist Gareth Jones responds to daily life in the Grow Eco-Pod
Artist Gareth Jones has spent the last two months as artist-in-residence in the Grow Eco-Pod, which is located in Main Yard outside Grow. This pod is designed by local sustainable architecture practice, Studio Bark, and its purpose is to be self-built and to help make construction more affordable. To mark the end of Gareth's residency, and Wick Wednesday on 21 February, we invite you to enter the pod to see the work he made during this residency as well as a painting which was recently shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Show.
About his residency, Gareth says:
"The location of the Eco-Pod gives views of the unseen sources of the many noises, sitting elevated above the yard at Wallis Road, there is a birds-eye view of the comings and goings. A hub of activity: all sorts of people come and go; artists, delivery couriers, kitchen staff, skip-divers, local industry, estate agents, security guards (and dogs), scaffolders, landlords, parents and children, party goers. Performers in a transient unperceived relationship: separate yet co-dependent.
Adapting the Eco-Pod (from live/work space to studio) was simplicity itself, half a day to remove the bunk beds located at one end turned the space into an adequately spacious studio. Without drafts or damp the insulated environment just needed a little heat in these colder months (which is maintained nicely) from a low powered electric heater.
Once the space was ready, working in a new location needs time to bed in, much like research, truer working can be challenging until a thread appears to pull leading to new focus. At some point the inertia of previous influences either die away or combine - melding into the newness, developing towards new ideas. Small and numerous exercises (to find ones feet in the space) connect the senses to the kinetics of making - drawing out the hidden reactions to be translated into marks, leading eventually to the creation of a body of new work, with the working title 'WickScapes'.
Focusing on the environment, the sounds and chaos of demolition and, in parallel, the ideas of loss (physical and psychological) small studies and exercises developed into emotive mark making. Monochromatic mediums laid down using frottage of found surfaces and tools marks, textures, and graininess developed into concentrated representations of angst and dislocation - as a reaction to seemingly unfettered disruption? The making is a physically demanding process - made in one visit to the work until complete, it feels as if fight has taken place. What remains is a record of a series of acts that accrete to form a document of a psychological journey pondering and reflecting destruction, disruption, and dislocation in Hackney Wick.
