• About the exhibition
• Visiting info
• Essay
• Artist biographies

Taking the form of a somewhat decaying yet synthetic ruin, Trappenkamp reflects Juneau Projects' ongoing fascination with the boundaries between the natural and the technological, the kitsch and the sublime, planning and happenstance. Initiated in 2001 by Birminghambased artists Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler, Juneau Projects' wide-ranging practice has incorporated all manner of materials and formats, including live and documented performances, installations, a record label, graphic design, landscape painting, costuming, and computer games. Collaboration – with groups of musicians or students, for example – is often key to their creative process.

Pulling together historically opposed traditions to allow for reassessment is an ongoing focus in their work. Here the notions of a pastoral idyll or a technologically advanced future can be re-engagement, critique, pathos and humour. The title of this commission was chosen with intentionally haphazard reasoning. Trappenkamp is a municipality in the district of Segeberg, Germany, but the word was selected purely for the associations it brings to mind. The artists clearly relish the playfulness of conjuring different connotations for every viewer; indeed the only connection to be found for most people might be to an imagined place.

You awake in a forest... You are lying on your back on the mossy floor... Slowly you get to your feet and pick up your bag. Which direction will you take now? 1

Trappenkamp could be viewed as a 3-D realisation of an older work, Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space, 2006. This was a text-based computer game which drew on the structure of interactive novels written for teenagers. Alluding to monumental themes, adventures and heroes, the game was intentionally clunky, dated to a recent past which appears now to be almost pre-technology. There are no realistically rendered images or movie soundtracks here. With this background, visitors to the sculpture court are suddenly the players in the game in real time, although unsurprisingly the goals and rules are unclear, or even non-existent. The planned events, during which the public will be invited to add mosses and plants to the shrine-like structure, further the sense that this seeming ruin is not in fact so old – or so natural – after all.

The eventual disintegration of this overgrown monument is at once pre-determined and casual. A wooden structure that has been both machine- and hand-crafted, it is clad with layers of organically shaped plywood panels that have been designed and cut with computerised machines. The artists have deliberately chosen to use a digital program to recreate a hand-carved style, and the plywood cladding, made from natural materials reshaped with toxic glues to look like 'real' wood, is well suited to this approach. The mosses covering the panels have largely been propagated by the artists in their gardens and studio and so are also, in effect, hand-made. This is a modest version of nature, gently creeping over the walls and ledges, and referencing Victorian mosseries and Japanese horticultural traditions; however the artists are careful to let these tiny plants do what they will. Emblems decorate the surface, joyfully creating a multitude of references: nostalgia for a pre-Industrial England, the cottage industries of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the enthusiasm of nature groups, as well as all the clichés of the Romantic landscape tradition, and of suburbia and its rural aspirations. Juneau Projects seek to embrace these connections concurrently, inviting the visitor to do the same.

Juneau Projects have previously stated their ambivalent relationship to both the natural world and our constructed one, admitting that 'we're both quite afraid of nature'. In the project Walkman / Lake, 2001, they bonded the low and high tech by playing Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen on a portable tape recorder while it was rowed to the middle of a lake and lowered into the water. In other works mobile phone beeps have been remixed, deer skulls have been covered with flocking, and record players destroyed in a forest setting.

Much of their work to date has centred on the manifestations of subcultures such as Emo (Emotional Hardcore) rock groups and the pseudo-pagan Woodcraft Folk (an alternative to the Scouting movement), but they owe just as much to hobbyists, amateurs and inventors as they do to music and nature movements. Forms and styles are borrowed, and so is the language, keeping the viewer constantly flipping between belief and disbelief, and between genuine feeling and irony. The work is always self-reflexive, aware of its own references, and the titles are often both tragic and comic in tone, as in the projects Oh ye workers, forth unto the wild again, 2007, A rich future is still ours, 2003, and Where I lived and what I lived for, 2008.

The artists are not, however, playing a disingenuous game with their viewers or collaborators. Employing a knowing innocence, their position may be ironic, but it is never cynical. Their relationship to all information and methods remains open in order to bring things out of their usual contexts, to reconfigure, and to create new associations.

Trappenkamp upturns two major narratives, making human technologies appear mythical and dated, and bringing the presence and specificity of nature (albeit tiny mosses and forest floor plants) to the fore. Using materials and techniques beyond their traditional or original purposes, it champions the enthusiasm of the amateur gardener, the moss collector and the weekend landscape painter, while at the same time asserting that nature is reconstituted and charm fabricated. Pairing the optimism of the naturalist with the force of fallible technology, Trappenkamp dislodges some of our unthinking assumptions. Moving between grand traditions and small epiphanies, and between gentle poetry and thudding truism, it tells us that although technology may be flawed and nature dispassionate, the human imagination can still weave together new meanings and possibilities.

Sophie O'Brien

1. Juneau Projects, Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space, 2006, (opening text)