Imagine a City

CHRIS PICKUP || ARTIST DESIGNER SCULPTOR

original artwork

Link to my Axis site

Portraiture

IMAGINE A CITY...

A site responsive installation in a disused shop unit in the Odeon Arcade between Market Place and Cank St. Leicester. This installation was commissioned as a series of ephemeral art works to respond to selected sites in and around the city of Leicester.

Commissioned by Mantle Arts and sponsored by the Leicester based law firm Howes Percival LLP.

The Seed of a City

Click the image above to enter the details gallery

The work sited in its shop unit along with four works created by students who attended a workshop with the artist.

The Work

In this installation site responsive artist Chris Pickup has been commissioned to produce his personal response to the market area of Leicester City centre. Pickup’s work often references the museums and museum cabinets that have fascinated him throughout his life. He blends facts and subjective opinions together with a style of presentation that suggests an authoritative knowledge of the subject and so asks some interesting questions about how information is presented to us as fact.

The use of text is common practice in contemporary artwork but using text which explains and contextualises, making the work self explanatory, is more unusual. Pickup is interested in how an art work communicates its ideas especially to a ‘non gallery’ audience. Great attention has been paid to the visual appearance of the work. Through careful use of light the work draws the attention, like a jewellery shop window, at which point the text unlocks the ideas that lie behind it.

The central text within the cabinet reads as follows;

'In a time before the formation of a town or city the landscape and its abundant natural produce supported human endeavour. This was a time when resources were exploited. The animals, birds, fish, plants and indeed water were the resources to hand. However a fundamental change occurs when resources are gathered and traded as commodities. This is the seed of a city. Initially, and because of the restrictions of limited technology, trade would have centred on local commodities, the exotic being a rarity. As demand increases and technology allows the commodities become increasingly global. A modern market has fish from every ocean and produce from every soil on the planet. Needless to say these commodities are being consumed by a local, global population.'

The cabinet presents to the viewer six herbs and spices from all over the world, all purchased from Leicester market and embedded within six clear resin fish. The fish used as a mould for the casting is a sprat, again collected from the market and presented within the cabinet in a style reminiscent of numerous Natural History collections throughout the country. The sprat was selected for two reasons. Firstly, it represents all the fish available within the market and the fact that their availability is a product of the most modern transportation technology. Secondly, the sprat, across its various species, is a truly pan global fish and hence a suitable ambassador to present a selection of pan global herbs and spices.

A final panel within the cabinet presents three dried pressed edible plant samples. These were collected from the banks of the river Soar just north of Leicester. They are there to represent the resources which would have been available before the formation of the city.

The work comments on how the city's market forms the core of the city in more ways than a geographical one. It represents the activity that triggered its creation and now demonstrates the pan global nature of commerce in the 21st century. More indirectly the work alludes to how the nature of modern commerce both creates and services our ethnically rich cities.

Click Imagine a City... to view the Imagine a City... web site.

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