Shifting
Boundaries
Introduction
The extent to which buildings shape our life becomes obvious when we think
about it and stop taking them for granted.
We create buildings. Buildings affect us. We create more buildings - a
feed-back spiral of making and cumulative experience. Yet our notions and
experience of buildings has become limited and, as the curator believes,
removed from what was once a more fundamental relationship to structure,
to material, to making, and to our own needs.
The Mary E.
Black Gallery continues to remind us through its exhibitions of how
craft and design questions can enlarge our personal experience, and can
help us reconsider many of the decisions which we daily take for granted.
Chris Tyler, Mary E. Black Gallery.
Curator's
Statement
Shifting Boundaries explores these ideas, through materials
literally under our feet. Using simple elements like straw, clay, stone
and fibre it investigates meanings of structure in society, as well the
potential to use these in the creation of, not only buildings but
community as well.
Human, animal and plant shelters were once inexorably connected to the
earth. Local materials determined shape, use and longevity; there was a
magic in this cohesion. Not the magic of incantation, (though perhaps the
hard labour of days gone by, did by-times invoke the spirits) but the
magic of something working; when materials dance and shift into
patterns and rhythms which touch deep chords, resonating in and beyond the
maker.
Magic happens as we listen to the materials around us, listen to
language nearly forgotten in the Industrial World's urgency to learn high
tech linguistics.
Pushing
the Limits and Coming Full Circle
Growing public concern around the environmental and health costs
associated with modern building methods has given rise to a reexamination
of natural building materials and how they can be used in the modern
context. These materials offer the promise of non toxic, biodegradable,
low tech structures which allow us to live more lightly on the earth.
The process of direct involvement with personal building projects
shortcuts the many 'experts' we have built into our lives, making it
possible to disengage ourselves from myriad professionals who define where
and how we live and ultimately ... who we are.
Shifting Boundaries investigates natural building materials in
contemporary and traditional applications. The structures are linked
together by their earth based origins, and by the artist's intent to move
us in simple and playful ways towards a point where we realize anybody
can do that, and so perhaps, we shall.
The shapes and materials used in the exhibition liken boundaries to
frontiers which validate us on a daily basis. Poetry of form and the
mammoth silence of entered spaces shaped with natural materials leaves us
with a strength and integrity we can bring to other parts of our lives.
Earlier cultures understood these relationships and what they meant to the
health of the planet. Memories of those connections reside in all of us,
there for the summoning.
Kim Thompson
Tradition and modernity are merely two sides of the same coin - and must be
dealt with simultaneously. Building cannot be a rigid dogma, but a living organic,
ecological project. It is about continuity, based on memory, common sense and
experience, and is the foundation of innovation.
Hasan Uddin Khan
Functional art -- multi-purposed and elegant
An exploration of natural building materials.