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This online exhibition and public art commission discusses ideas around public spaces, ownership, monuments, and hostile architecture. It showcases works by Esther Gamsu, TOTALLER and Mickey Fenton. The idea was conceived by the programme committee member Eve Cromwell, as part of Overmorrow.
The NewBridge Project is commissioning a piece of public furniture that invites social relationships as a permanent monument to the present. The monument memorialises society here and now by enabling people to encounter each other. This space will encourage welcome without hostility, by celebrating the ideologies around building collective futures.
In November 2020 we put out an Open Call for ideas for an outdoor structure that will act as a public gathering space and permanent monument towards the future. In this online exhibition, three artists share their developed proposals for consideration. For the second phase of the project, one of the artists will execute the project in real life. Details of this phase will follow at a later date.
You will find an introduction to each artist on this page, and the full proposals on an exhibition site custom-built by the project’s instigator Eve Cromwell. The site also provides background on the project, her research, and links to related resources.
Associated events, reflections and further resources will be presented throughout the project, so stay tuned to our events page and social media for further details as we have them!
Mickey Fenton is a designer-maker, based in Dundee, Scotland, with a focus on spatial and furniture design. Throughout his studies and since graduating, Mickey has created projects that span across interior, spatial, furniture or installation design; often blurring the distinctions between art and design
For this project, Mickey has proposed a Modular Monument for Public Space comprised of numerous benches made from painted steel and reclaimed timber, each module can be moved and rearranged; collected together to act as a facilitator of group reunion and connection, or split apart and separated if social distancing is needed.
TOTALLER is a collective of four core members: Lesley Guy, Dale Holmes, Lea Torp Nielsen and Chris Fielder. They explore spaces for making, allowing for the coproduction of new forms of creativity. Employing fiction and fandom as method, they investigate the process of mutable togetherness.
This proposal focuses on the social need for, and overlooked uses of, public furniture, and keys into their obsession with the sculptural enablement of social encounters. The piece centres on the phrase IDST which they describe as ‘an imaginative spell across time cast from the magical teenage repertoire, with a marker pen.’
Esther Gamsu is an artist based in Glasgow. Working with film and sculpture, she uses humour as a communicational tool to explore how we build our identities by borrowing from the world around us. Her work aims to seek out and explore shared identities and experiences with audiences, and she has a particular interest in public art, which began during a University exchange semester in Shenyang, China.
She has proposed comical oversized ruins to create a humorous spectacle, encouraging us to explore how we can learn from the past to shape our futures, and consider what we want from our public spaces. She believes it isn’t just up to artists, councils and commissioners to choose how our public spaces should be, and for that reason she has posed some questions to the viewer…
Exhibition link available in the event description above.
This event is accessed remotely online.
The NewBridge Project is supported by Arts Council England, Newcastle Culture Investment Fund, Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice and the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
