Pub Crawl ( 100,000 beermats )

PINT CONTEMPORARY ARTS FESTIVAL, Burton upon Trent (Oct 2012)

Site-specific sculptural installation at Brewhouse Arts Centre commissioned for festival and sponsored by Marston's Brewery who provided 100000 beermats.

For this commission I wanted to create a sculpture appropriate to the context of the PINT Contemporary Arts Festival which is an ambitious exhibition selecting the best artists from Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire. I proposed to create a sculptural installation out of 100.000  beermats that I would build onsite at the Brewhouse Arts Centre and was a nod to the towns brewery heritage. The sculpture would grow , sprawl and crawl through the space, as it climbed from the ground floor through the atrium and onto the next floor. All the beermats were the same but had different deigns on either side  - one side predominantly cream, the other side predominantly black.; and by fanning the beermats either tightly or widely I was able to bring out the coloured text. By thinking about how I used the colour I has able to add to the visual momentum I could give to the sculpture - speeding it up in parts and slowing I others. I built the sculpture over a four days in a live sculptural performance. I reacted to the space taking advantage of a shuttered door to provide the illusion of the sculpture entering or leaving the building. The sculpture was well received by the regular theatre goers and created a lot of publicity for the festival appearing in the local newspapers many times and was even visited by the towns mayor.

Below are some photographs of the installation.