Untitled (Ladder) forms part of the MA Art Practice exhibition, 2011, University of Glamorgan, Trefforest campus, Wales, UK.
The work is a development of a sequence of site-oriented and site specific works made between 2010-11: responses to found, often overlooked spaces. Untitled (Ladder) has evolved from investigations of related interior and exterior spaces in a building known as ‘K’ Block – once an engineering school , now art studios and gallery.
Intrigued by Gaston Bachelard’s poetic ideas of the threshold, in-between and the dialectics of space such as inside / outside , high / low, above / below, near and far… the work began by looking at the architecture of the roof area and its parallel relationship with the studios below; the long opaque windows seemed to mark the line of an in between – the broken, dysfunctional handrail of the old fire escape now finds a way inside, through a small opening in a cracked window.
Extending into the cell-like space below, the rusted steel forms into a kind of ladder, but one that is broken, dangerous, fragile and precarious. Dualities within the original architecture – particulary those of the two discovered winding mechanisms (that once opened all windows with ordered, systematic synchronisity) draw attention to the correspondance of dialectics such as open and closed – the ‘ladder’ makes its escape through an opposite, but still only partially opened or closed window, where it forces its way up to eventually emerge on an opposite, outside, other side. Reflected in a glassed area of the concrete floor, the ladder apears to extend beneath, as well as above.
christinemarfleet 