15 November 1999 – 13 February 2000
Nine leading British sculptors have worked with the Tate Gallery and Homebase in a unique collaborative project that culminates this autumn. Angela Bulloch, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Permindar Kaur, David Mach, Richard Wentworth and Alison Wilding have each created an object, designed for mass production, for display or use in the home. Each artist began the project by visiting a particular household, taking into account the ways in which objects were used and displayed.
With funding from Homebase, the objects, ranging from pure sculpture to functional objects such as a table lamp, a shower curtain, or a set of garden tools, are to be manufactured and made available for sale in Homebase stores nationally, as well as in the Tate Gallery shop, from late October 1999. The final products, together with documentary material, preliminary drawings and prototypes, will be exhibited in a single room display at the Tate Gallery, London, from 15 November 1999. The exhibition, organised in collaboration with National Touring Exhibitions from the Hayward Gallery, will then tour the UK for two years, starting in February 2000.
Contemporary art rarely finds its way into people’s homes. Yet people surround themselves in their homes with images and objects which perform aesthetic roles as well as marking events, anniversaries, rites of passage - in some way defining the owners’ identities. In this project contemporary artists participate in domestic life, addressing the realities of the home positively, conceiving works for mass production, and offering them for sale in the mass market at low prices.
The project has been devised and organised by artist and curator Professor Colin Painter, former Principal of Wimbledon School of Art, whose research into the ways people relate to objects and images in their homes led to his 1996 National Gallery exhibition At Home with Constables’ Cornfield. In 1998 he curated the exhibition The Uses of an Artist: Constable in Constable Country Now at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, and wrote the book of the same title which is distributed by Tate Gallery Publishing.
Accompanying the exhibition there will be a 64 page fully illustrated catalogue, published by Hayward Gallery Publishing. Edited by Professor Painter, it will document the project’s progress including statements from artists and householders. A related symposium will be held at the Tate on 4 February 2000, supported by David and Janice Blackburn. A fifty minute documentary about the project will be screened on the BBC 2 art series, Close Up, this autumn.
Wimbledon School of Art has supported the research associated with the production of the prototypes as part of its research programme. The project has received additional funding from the Arts Council of England’s New Audiences programme.