Architecture | angellspace

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Helen Angell-Preece’s art practice resides within the threshold. She explores the space between inside and outside, the solid and the void, the body and architecture.

For this exhibition, the artist responds to the unique corner site of the Tatha Gallery, on the bank of the River Tay and the edge of Fife, contemplating the building’s original function as a Coaching Inn, to provide hospitality to the passing Stranger.

The comfort and luxury of velvet and upholstery contrast with the tilting un-homely angle of the floorboards and unbalanced seat, bringing to mind our often ambivalent attitude to welcoming the foreigner within our midst, as well as acknowledging the Stranger within ourselves.

The velvet rope demarcating a space of safety and home for the permitted few, can also act as a suffocating barrier, inhibiting opportunities to see and experience from different angles of vision.

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Pine Maritime Floorboards, Upholstered Dining Chair, Bannister Posts, Velvet, Upholstery Cord, Screws.

260cm x 100cm x 150cm (length x height x depth)

Warped Space (The Things We Carry With Us / The Things We Left Behind) 2018

Warped Space

(The Things We Carry With Us / The Things We Left Behind) 2018

Linen, Jute, OSB Board, CLS Wood, Travelling Trunk.

The tension of the warp thread repeatedly connects two opposing sides.

The weft thread pulls together the closing gap, forming a construction of immense strength and flexibility.

Utilising the global language of textile construction, artist Helen Angell-Preece establishes a Threshold Space for the viewer to negotiate and inhabit.

An architectural intervention of Linen, Jute, Felt and everyday building materials, is a timely reminder, not only of Scotland’s colonial histories of textile trade and manufacture, but of the personal significance of our everyday materiality in establishing our human ‘being’ within the world.

Linen, Jute, Felt, OSB Board, CLS Wood, Travelling Trunk.

9 x 8 x 4.4m (L x D x H)

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within – at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Jersey Lycra Fabric, Wooden batons, Print drying rack, Steel hooks and eyes. 600 x 400cm x 250cm

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

CLS wood, acrylic paint, wool, wooden panelling, wardrobe door. 500 x 170 x 230cm

There’s no Place like Home? (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

There's no Place like Home? (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

There's no Place like Home? (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

CLS wood, door, interior gloss, Perspex, plywood. 300cmx250cmx285cm

There’s no Place like ‘Home’? (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

There's no Place like 'Home'? 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

CLS wood, door, interior gloss, Perspex, plywood. 300cmx250cmx285cm

Beyond Skin 2016

Beyond Skin 2016

The place where we encounter the Stranger is a threshold.

Metaphorically, we can see “thresholds” defining the the edges of human being in many ways: () at the limits of my physical body, a threshold of pain, of pleasure, a threshold at the limits of one culture and another, one political group and another.

At such thresholds of experience, we stand in an event: an opening onto hospitality. But doors can be opened or shut. Or stand ajar. It may be unclear who or what moves first.[1]

A shelter, an extension of the space of the body made from membranous, skin-like materials.

Awkward angles describe a lived space within, hybrid wooden structures that could be stage flats, sections of stud wall or lean-to roofing anchor dynamic swathes of soft jersey dancer’s fabric.

At once warm and welcoming, this architecture of non-place forces a negotiation of barriers or thresholds, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out.

We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between Hostility and Hospitality.

Artist Helen Angell-Preece has created this installation in response to the idea of Being in Place, from the position of her own creative practice exploring the sense of being ‘not in place’, not belonging, or in locating and identifying oneself in multiple places at once.

The artist believes this threshold position to be one of value, a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. The ability to recognise we are all Strangers, we are all somehow Foreigners, may perhaps lead us to a Place where,

each would take the risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather, delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover, to respect, to favor, to cherish.[2]

[1] Kearney, Richard., and Semonovitch, Kascha. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger New York: Fordham University Press P4.

[2] Cixous, Helene. 1972. ‘Sorties’, The Newly Born Woman London: I. B. Tauris P78.

Jersey Lycra Fabric, CLS timber, packing string, acrylic paint. 2016

Walk : Don’t Walk

Walk : Don't Walk 2016

My work is driven by a fascination with urban Space and Place – in particular the ‘Edgelands’ or liminal, between spaces of the city where a construction site or derelict building reveals the armature of our dwelling, showing the physical and material aspect of our ‘Being’ in the world.

Drawing upon my own experience and research within city space, I construct interactive installations, choreographing a journey with structure, rhythm, contrasting materials and colour, a physical space for the viewer to experience for themselves.

My intention in creating this kinaesthetic experience, is to put the audience temporarily in the position or role of the ‘Stranger’, or the ‘Foreigner’. In so doing we have a heightened sense of our bodies, of ourselves, of our existence and ‘Being’ within the world.

For the PG Humanities Rebirth conference 2016, I installed within the University of Dundee, Dalhousie Building a ramp and platform walkway constructed using re-appropriated wooden palettes found on the street. This structure, using materials associated with movement of goods and international transit, has been re-formed, painted, re-constructed, re-born to form a liminal threshold space to be negotiated by the viewer.

Wood, palettes, acrylic paint, wool. 1m x 4m x 3m

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space) 2016

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space)

Horos, khoros, choros: a space, a boundary marker, dance,

Many of the man-made structures, buildings and settlements visited on a study trip to Athens and Aegina had a visible as well as tangible, layered, complicated history. Their purpose was multi-functional and has un-definable identities.

Acropolis in Athens (Acro, meaning edge or extremity, polis, meaning, city) functioned as a sacred space, a temple to worship and receive protection from the gods. But it also served as a fortification, for if the city was to be successfully captured by enemy forces, the Acropolis also had to be possessed as well.

Kolona Archaeological Site – layers of time are visible in a series of ten towns each built on the ruins of the previous one during the Bronze Age (2500-1600 B.C.) The architecture of the houses changed and responded to outside attacks from the sea, doors and windows turning inwards, the walls of the domestic home becoming a part of the city wall and fortification.

Kapodistriako Orfanotrofeio Orphanage building has been a refuge for children, housed vast numbers of war refugees, as well as functioning as a Prison to incarcerate Greek citizens during the German occupation of the Island, and later political prisoners post-2^nd World War.

War Bunkers at Perdika Concrete and Iron defences built into the headland of the Island, materials and construction originally carried out by Germans during WW1, they were subsequently used against the allied forces during WW2.

Although not inspired by such painful and traumatic events, this kind of complicated overlapping of space and place, is one I relate to in the aims of my own installation practice.

Making use of boundaries, barriers and edges I am inspired by the Edgelands and non-places of the city to create a space of indeterminate identity, which contrasts and jars with its surrounding environment. The purpose of these experiential installations is to make the viewer more aware of both their surroundings and of themselves ‘Being there’ in that moment.

The physicality of the act of creating these sometimes uncomfortable interventions is important, as is the kinaesthetic sense they instill upon entering. They are a way of exploring a sense of ‘not Belonging’, not ‘Being at home’ in the world, and the mediation between feeling rooted in a place and conversely the freedom, heightened awareness and possibility of movement that comes from being put in the position of the Foreigner, or the Stranger.

These physical installations can be described as embodying the concept of Horos – a space, a non-place, a boundary marker, a choreography – an area defined by movement / action of the Body.

Ehfkhareesto Pollee to Elika Vlachaki, Nancy Avgery and George Mouratides.

Wood, palettes, scaffold safety netting, pattern paper, digital photographs, steel wire, wool. 2.5m x 2.5m x 3m

Location RED 2014

Location RED

The rich potential relations between thinking and the body, the way one person’s act can be an invitation to another’s imagination; the way every gesture can be imagined as a brief and invisible sculpture; the way walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it. Rebecca Solnit 2001. Wanderlust: a history of walking London: Verso.P276

The important thing is to be aware one exists. For three-quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth, which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. Jean-Luc Godard quoted In Penz, Francois. and Thomas, Maureen. (eds), 1997. Cinema & Architecture, London: British Film Institute, P111

Location: Top Floor, Meadowmill – Formerly South Dudhope Jute Mill, West Hendersons Wynd, Old Industrial Quarter, Dundee, Scotland. 2011

RED: Signifier of human presence – Map marker – “You are here”

This dual-screen video installation is a record of the last original, remaining floor of the Meadowmill building prior to renovation into Artist’s studios in 2011. Despite, and perhaps because of, its semi-derelict state, the video footage reveals the beauty inherent in Dundee’s Industrial Architecture - its symmetry of line, ranks of windows letting light pour onto the pattern of flagstones underfoot and the sheer grandeur of the vaulted roof and expansive scale room.

This scale is contrasted with that of the human form as we catch glimpses of the artist’s body in RED as she explores the space - her movements responding to the shapes and forms of the architecture, suggested by the exuberance of the open expanse of space or possible actions of former inhabitants and workers of the looms and spinners.

Yet despite the strength apparent in both the building’s and the body’s structure, there is a fragility and sense of loss in the peeling paint, the decaying damp walls - as well as in the skin and lines of the hand, the arm as it strives to measure itself against the rooms perspective. There is a vulnerability to the sound of the body’s breathing and footsteps within the echoing abandoned room, contrasting to the sounds of the busy city sirens and construction noises from outside.

In this exploration of the Space between Architecture and the Body, the artist hopes to question and reveal some of the Universal elements with which we make ourselves at ‘Home’. How do our own body armature, the structures we build around ourselves, as well as the emotional and historical aspects of Place interact to give us our sense of ‘Being’ in the world? Perhaps the answer lies in the Space we inhabit, falling somewhere between the Solid and the Void?

Location RED 2014

Dual Screen Video Projection. Duration 20mins, over 9 Sequences.