The Unfolding Terrace

About

During month-long residencies, each artist made explorations of the building’s many walkways, stairwells and alcoves, forming personal responses to being in this architecture.

Their resulting works, brought together in this exhibition, challenge the perception of the building’s concrete structure. Visitors are invited to embark on their own journeys around unfolding terraces, linking these different avenues of thought and activity.

Poppy Whatmore’s Dividers series comprise concrete casts of flatpack stationary that echo both Modernist artworks, such as Suprematist paintings, as well as the geometric forms of the building’s modular design. Stemming from her residency in the empty architect’s studio during the winter lockdown, these sculptural works can also be read as relics of a future that is already here, forming a speculative archaeology that marks the uncertain status of the office.

Fiona Grady’s site-specific vinyl installation has emerged from her wider research project Vanishing Points that seeks to blur the reality of physical space, exploring a building’s ability to channel light and colour. Her geometric abstractions strip back to the fundamental structure of the building's core design. Her work offers new lines of convergence between user and architecture, absorbing in moments of kaleidoscopic pleasure.

Ben McDonnell works with photography and image making, mixing analogue processes and contemporary 3D scanning techniques. His artwork takes as its focus the flexible rubber ligature that occupies the spaces between the concrete sections of the building, allowing it to expand and contract. This has allowed Ben to think about the building as a living, breathing structure.

Also on display are outputs from a workshop ‘Performing for the Camera’, McDonnell ran with Studio 1.5 students from The Bartlett School of Architecture. Students were encouraged to think of the context of The Brunswick Centre as a supporting structure and create work that could only exist within the frame of the image.