Project Director’s Journal
Extra - 11 April 2003
The exhibition may be next year and
much to do between now and then, but I was delighted to read
Jay Merrick's comments in an article written for the April
2003 edition of UK magazine 'Art Review'. In this article
he links the approaches taken by the artists in 'Textural
Space' with that of architect Philip Bintliff, who will be
the designer of the THROUGH THE SURFACE exhibition. It seems
that Jay Merrick has given a glimpse of the shape of things
to come.
'.It may have looked fragile and empty,
but the concoction devised by the Think architectural consortium
for New York's World Trade Center site was clearly the most
enthralling single structure offered to the redevelopers...I
saw Think's tower before they did. There it was, hanging in
the Sainsbury Gallery at the University of East Anglia more
than two years ago in the riveting 'Textural Space' exhibition,
curated by Lesley Millar. The creator of the piece was the
Japanese paper-fabric artist Chika Ohgi. Its very long and
loosely rectilinear form hung like a slim lantern and, from
a distance, seemed composed of a chaos of ivory Pic-Up Stix.
Closer up, the angular gaps between the fabric's translucent
threads were compelling - and, to me, of obvious architectural
potential. "Can it be long" I wrote at the time,
"before Chika Ohgi's beautiful Water Pillar Towers are
reincarnated in the façades or even structures, of
skyscrapers?" Short pause for smugness. I'd like to claim
that this deduction came to me without reference to anything
I'd experienced before. But I cannot, because...Philip Bintliff's
wonderful 'stealth' screen-wall at the Simon Jersey factory
in Accrington had already trip-wired my interest in the subject
of radical textures in modern architecture.'
Jay Merrick.
'The spirit of the place'. Art Review April 2003
Lesley Millar
Project Director THROUGH THE SURFACE
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