058 BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
Site-specific art installations can reveal a whole lot more about the qualities and narratives underpinning the significant places they are responding to, as Veronica Simpson finds out
I LOVE A GOOD conversation – the more free- range the better, complete with serendipitous and intuitive turns and twists. Which may be one of the reasons why, as a writer across art, design and architecture, I take particular pleasure from a good site-responsive installation. It brings all my favourite disciplines together: the artist’s work dialoguing with your own thoughts, emotions and senses, but also with the interior and architectural setting and its wider context.
Two of the most memorable and fascinating ‘conversations’ I have witnessed this summer are by two very diff erent artists in two contrasting sites. One was a place of worship, built by an architectural legend, to serve a city that is drenched in beauty; a city that has arguably been at the centre of an elite, aesthetic universe for the past 700 or so years, for which privilege it is now deluged with gawping tourists. T e other was an extraordinary, opulent, Victorian mansion, built as a bespoke home for a wealthy aristocratic family, on an island on the west coast of Scotland – well off the mainstream tourist trail.
Belgian artist Berlinda de Bruyckere was commissioned this year to create work for the Basilica of the San Giorgio Maggiore church in Venice, designed by the supreme renaissance
architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) in 1566 and completed after his death in 1580. Its white walls create a wonderful setting for the Tintorettos and assorted statues and devotional icons placed around this cavernous structure. T ey also create a stunning backdrop for de
Bruyckere’s Arcangeli, three human-scale fi gures, their heads shrouded in waxed blankets, shreds of which dangle around their legs. T ese fl eshy, life-sized fi gures look wounded, dirty, evoking suff ering but also humanity. T ey are placed for maximum impact around the nave and side aisles, supported on rough plinths, one made of rusted metal; another’s timber base is burnished with silver paint. Other ‘accessories’ to the Arcangeli include a timber frame draped in swagged cloth and carpet, and assorted mirror-polished metal panels. T ese rough- hewn, everyday textures bring an ordinary, domestic quality into this temple of reverence. But they also bring something more: the bunched folds and creases of de Bruyckere’s swagging sculpture dialogue with the beautifully rendered, painted or sculpted robes of the religious scenes and fi gures nearby; the gleaming silvery paint on rough wood plinths shines in sympathy with all the glittering brass, gold and silver around it; the mirrored metal
Below, from left
Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle has conjured a simple hut, a gathering space she calls An Assembly
or Ting (2024), to reference both Scottish bothies and Barbadian chattel houses; One of Whittle’s Beneath the Waves tapestries
slabs refl ect the haunting/haunted forms of de Bruyckere’s Arcangeli, but also our modest human fi gures. I felt simultaneously elevated and humbled, estranged and included; a heady cocktail of emotions that conjures up very potently what it is to be human. In a video interview with the artist, de Bruyckere says she hopes her Arcangeli express ‘suff ering and empathy, compassion and death, but also joy’. Death and suff ering, she says, are things we seek to avoid in contemporary life, but ‘they are all part of life’s richness and beauty’. In this way, her work envelopes the more positive and benign traditions of the church – of bringing comfort, consolation and inspiration – in ways that are deeply meaningful for our complicated, contemporary lives.
Meanwhile, a lavish home for an
aristocratic Scottish family – descendants of the Stuart kings and queens – has been emptied out of its intended inhabitants and become a repository for art and encounter. Mount Stuart is one of the most extraordinary historic homes I have ever visited, fi lled with exquisite craftsmanship and materials, from the stained glass windows in the central, Marble Hall that
FROM RIGHT: VERONICA SIMPSON
FROM RIGHT: MIRJAM DEVRIENDT
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