Site Specific Art Project


House, Grove Road E3, Rachel Whiteread, 1993 [Photos RKM]
Task Process Step 1: Contextual research Step 2: Site research Step 3: Develop work Case Study: Home Truths Other recent site specific work
	Task
	Develop a proposal for a site specific artwork for an imaginary local commission. The piece could be in 2D or 3D, but should reflect the nature or history of the selected site and your relationship to it, or its significance for you. You should use image manipulation software to locate your work "in situ" by virtual means.
	Process
	Begin with an overview of a range of site specific art practices Find out more about your site's unique character through internet searches or in your local library Make a site visit to your selected location to take photographs, make sketches and notes, do rubbings of surfaces or take clay impressions, take measurements, collect local materials, leaflets, information Scan site materials, maps, site-related text, old photographs, and use image-manipulation software to make digital montages Save all digital work to a project folder to create an e-sketchbook Make a maquette if you are planning 3D work Locate your finished design at the original site using image manipulation software Write a 100 word description of your proposed artwork
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Step 1: Contextual research
Site specific is an evolving contemporary art practice which takes many forms, embracing land art, installation, performance, monumental and ephemeral art. Work may be realised through an important public commission or a modest personal intervention; it could be permanent or transitory; literal or allegorical; confined to a particular location or mobile; exist in real time or only through documentation - photographs, texts, video. Site specific work simultaneously explores the artist's relationship with a site and remodels the spectator's. Site Specific Art - to gain an overview of a range of iconic site specific works, view the introductory PowerPoint presentation and its accompanying notes, seek the answers to the web-search questions on the final slide, and find out more about the artist or site specific artwork that intrigues you most. Make notes and thumbnail sketches of interesting ideas in your project journal or sketchbook .
Right -click/Control click on the title slide above to download the presentation.
Download a free 21-day evaluation version of Winzip* file compression software for PC (opens in new window).* Click on the button to download a Microsoft PowerPoint viewer if you do not have the program (opens in new window).
A Virtual Sculpture Trail - the PowerPoint presentation looks in detail at a temporary exhibition of site specific sculpture that was located at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in 2003:
Right -click/Control click on the title slide above to download the presentation.
The Fourth Plinth Project is a short presentation with notes on the temporary sculptures that have been sited on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square. It aims to stimulate further visual research for a project to create a site specific public sculpture. It can be shown as a linear presentation or browsed from the hyperlinked images on slide 2. [474 KB]



		Use my Flashpoint activity about the effect scale has on sculpture as an interactive lesson starter to introduce a 3D project: Size Matters.

Embankment, Rachel Whiteread 2005-6 Embankment, an Unilever sponsored installation by Turner Prize winning artist, Rachel Whiteread, who was awarded an OBE in 2006, was installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern from October 2005 to May 2006. It was a labyrinthine installation of 14,000 casts of the interiors of different cardboard boxes, manufactured in translucent white polyethylene and stacked high in regular and irregular piles. The title refers both to the location of Tate Britain on the banks of the Thames and also to the barriers formed within the maze by the boxes themselves. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/whiteread/
	Photos © RKM
The boxes were rich in visual associations - children's building blocks, Karl André's bricks, Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, Donald Judd's minimalist sculptures, warehouses, mass production. The installation itself in its sheer scale conjured artic landscapes; buildings devastated by war, earthquake or time; and urban regeneration projects shrouded in plastic clad scaffolding. As I left the building, on the opposite bank of the river, the restoration work on St Paul's Cathedral took on the appearance of another Whiteread installation. I snapped it against the book I had just bought in the gallery shop inspired by the show to devise a project on boxes: Structural Package Designs by Pepin van Roojen (Pepin Press/Agile Rabbit Publications, Amsterdam, 2003).
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Step 2: Site research
Download an example brief in the style of competitions for commissions found in Artists' Newsletter and other professional art publications that you can use as a model for your own local brief. The example is an imaginary commission for a temporary site specific artwork for Clapton Portico, a disused building in East London, which is scheduled for refurbishment by Hackney council. In 1999 the building was the site of temporary work by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed who made a neon message for the façade - "Everything is Going to be Alright" (Work No 203).
		Commission - Word document [36 KB] Commission - PDF [31 KB]
Click on the button to download a Microsoft Word* viewer if you do not have the program. Opens in new window.* Click on the button to download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Opens in new window.
Research your site in advance of your visit to get as much preliminary information about it as you can - internet searches and local libraries, as well as people who work/ed there or who live nearby, may yield interesting facts about its origins, history, location, past and present purpose, future plans, and its local significance.

The site visit is the most crucial stage of the preparation - use it to gather detailed visual research in every possible medium - use photography, drawing, note-taking, digital video, cameras in mobile phones, take measurements, make graphite rubbings or clay impressions of surfaces for collages and plaster-casts, collect found objects, natural and manufactured - even record the ambient sounds of the place. Build up an exhaustive record of the physical space and your situated experience of it. Make sure that you take wide location shots of the site, as well as close macro details, and from different viewpoints. Depending on location, you may even have time to create temporary work on site from found materials or objects, as in the examples below of pupil work made on a North Wales beach and in a London park.

Other ideas for interesting local sites Transport - bus depots, bus shelters, buses, train stations, underground stations, docks or ports Public buildings - hospitals, libraries, parks, your school, historic houses, museums or galleries
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	Step 3: Develop work
	Don't limit yourself to experimentation in a single medium. In addition to your project journal or sketchbook, create a project folder for your digital work, which will develop into your e-sketchbook. Save all your scans and downloaded photos to it, as well as versions of your image manipulations and digital experiments. At the end of the project you could lay out your electronic sketchbook pages by inserting saved digital work into a Word document, which should also be saved to the folder. Alternatively, you could create sketchbook pages in your image software - see the tutorial on page layout in Photoshop for an example.

	3D work
	If you decide to make a 3D model of your proposed sculpture, photograph it against a plain backdrop and, in image editing software, create an artist's impression of the work on site. Use layer masks to combine the picture of the maquette with a photo of the site from your visit. Re-size the model using your software's Edit > Transform > Scale tools and set it into the background more convincingly by cloning some of the background onto a new layer. For detailed tutorials on these techniques in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro follow links to the Image manipulation area of the site: Image Manipulation.

	Seagull maquette by Robert, Year 8 - digitally located on the estuary at Bury Port, South Wales.

	Year 9 pupils' site specific proposals: Terri made Marilyn's Lips for the Screen on the Green Cinema, Islington; Gary's Giving Arsenal the Boot maquette is for the North Stand at the old Arsenal stadium.
	2D work
	Use digital montage techniques to combine images, scans, and meaningful text to design painted, textile or photographic panels, murals or site specific work that could be exhibited away from source location. The final work could be executed in other media.

	This is part of a series of mixed media work called "Old Fires: The Elba", which commemorates the site of a former South Wales steelworks, demolished in the 1970's, and the lives of its anonymous workers. The site briefly returned to common land, but has now been redeveloped as a housing estate and sports complex. The montage is proposed as one of a series of temporary site specific artworks that explore local history for the village bus service: art on the move.
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	Case Study
	Home Truths This was an artist's residency commissioned by The Geffrye Museum during which I worked with the art department of neighbouring Haggerston Girls' School and a group of Year 10 students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who lived locally in Hoxton. The aim was to produce site specific work that introduced pupils to mixed media practice and collaborative working methods. Our work was displayed in the museum gallery at the end of the residency. http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk
		A series of Perspex boxes offered a critique of the museum displays, which concealed other histories behind the comfortable domestic interiors on show. The boxes contained text, images and small artefacts that suggested other narratives. For example, the sugar cubes and images of slavery in the Georgian Room box referred to the source of Sir Robert Geffrye's wealth - the museum having been founded on the profits of his sugar plantations in the West Indies.
	The Victorian Room disguised the existence of the child labour that kept its occupants warm and clean; the 1950's Room ignored the experience of early immigrants to London from the West Indies, who were frequently refused accommodation because of their colour; while the 1930's Room made no reference to the 1936 street riots known as the Battle of Cable Street, where demonstrators successfully fought to stop the police clearing a route for Oswald Mosley's fascist march just a stone's throw away from the museum.


	Other work included a series of images of the museum's displays of "English domestic interiors" projected onto the pupils, whose multi-ethnic Englishness was not represented by the collection, and a tape-slide show that brought images of the students' own domestic interiors and cultures into the institutional space.
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	Other recent site specific work Art and Science A series of three window displays by design team Doshi Levien was on show at the Wellcome Trust's headquarters in Euston Road earlier this year. Illustrated is Curiosity, a crazy café stage set that employs storytelling techniques to engage and educate passersby into the research work of the Trust: http://wellcomewindow.com/ Photo: RKM
	The Fourth Plinth Project http://www.fourthplinth.co.uk/ Marc Quinn's sculpture, Alison Lapper Pregnant, which was unveiled in September, is the fourth temporary installation on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth. Carved from white Carrera marble, the sculpture is 12 foot (3.6 metres) high and weighs 13 tonnes. The portrait is of disabled artist Alison Lapper. She has called it a "modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood" and says, "It puts disability on the map", contrasting the experience of sitting for the portrait with that of having medical photos taken of her as a child. "I didn't have any choice, they were taken from me. I chose to do this, it has been empowering for me and for disabled people."

	Photos RKM
	Marc Quinn believes that "Alison's statue could represent a new model of female heroism." In this predominantly masculine stage dedicated to heroes of epic battles and colonial power, the Quinn sculpture shifts the focus to a more personal, female perspective. While challenging conventional representations of beauty and attitudes to disability, the sculpture makes ironic allusion to that classical armless icon of female beauty, the Venus de Milo, and reminds us of neighbouring Nelson's similar disability. The Fourth Plinth is located in the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square in front of the National Gallery. Originally designed by Sir Charles Barry and built in 1841 to display an equestrian statue, there were insufficient funds so the plinth remained empty until the last decade. Would the work have a greater or lesser impact if it was on a more human scale? Compare it with Mark Wallinger's white marble sculpture of Christ, called Ecco Homo, which occupied the plinth in 1999.
	Mayday 2006 Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, Hackney, was the site of a temporary intervention by community artist Gaiamere (gaiamere@blueyonder.co.uk), who took tree dressing a step closer to Come Dancing with two works called Darling Buds and Dandy Dancer. She also hung a small show of work by children at a local Primary school, William Patten, between two saplings facing the more stately dancers. Gaiamere is the artist who made an illicitly placed teacup for the giant Writer's Desk sculpture that towered over picnickers on Hampstead Heath in summer 2005, and which is featured in the Size Matters Flash activity. Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, Hackney, was the site of a temporary intervention by community artist Gaiamere (gaiamere@blueyonder.co.uk), who took tree dressing a step closer to Come Dancing with two works called Darling Buds and Dandy Dancer. She also hung a small show of work by children at a local Primary school, William Patten, between two saplings facing the more stately dancers. Gaiamere is the artist who made an illicitly placed teacup for the giant Writer's Desk sculpture that towered over picnickers on Hampstead Heath in summer 2005, and which is featured in the Size Matters Flash activity. Photos © RKM Photos © the artist
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