Tatton Park Biennial 2010
Neville Gabie, A Weight of Ice Carried from the North for You, installation view, Tatton Park Biennial, 2010.Neville Gabie’s installation in Tatton Park’s Formal Gardens is comprised of a 2.5 ton iceberg presented inside of a purpose-built, solar-powered freezer. The title seems to portray the work as a romantic gesture, ushering away thoughts on global warming and carbon footprints. However the iceberg’s majesty is diluted. It is like a caged animal. It is the journey of which we are in awe: the journey receives the wonderment the iceberg, in its native environment, would normally command of us. The work succeeds in highlighting the fragility and transience of our global environment.
Jem Finer’s Spielgelei doesn’t appear very attractive, or subtle, from the outside. It’s a garden shed (it’s pretty hard to escape shed-art at the Biennial) with a large mirrored sphere on its roof. Step inside and up the stairs though, and with your head inside the sphere you can observe the landscape in a brand new way. The sphere - with a number of holes around its horizontal axis - operates as a camera obscura, projecting a layered, miniature, subverted and beautiful perspective of the surrounding gardens.
Tatton Park Biennial runs until September 26th 2010.
Jem Finer, Spiegelei, installation view, Tatton Park Biennial, 2010.Saturday, 8 May 2010
Detail from Splash, 2008.