Working with in various different mediums including film, sculpture, installation and photography Laura and Sarah make work that attempts to challenge the way we view and interact with a space. Bouncing ideas from each other they develop body of work that absorb and question rules of architecture and public art creating sculptural / video installations.

Both recently graduated.

In summer 2009 Laura took part in a film workshop held at the Tate Modern in conjunction with Stranger Festival in Amsterdam. Her film ‘How to meet strangers’ filmed in the famous Turbine Hall at the Tate was chosen to be shown at the Stranger Festival in Amsterdam and later shown in the Portobello Film Festival.

L&S: The construction ideas we were having would require the input of two people, physically, to make them possible. (….) During the first term of our third year we started out with an empty shared studio space. We soon filled it with various materials that we had collected from around the university campus. These included pallets, perforated metal and large pieces of cardboard. We chose these materials because they were large and easy to construct with. After experimenting with all of the materials, we found that pallets were best suited to what we were trying to achieve. The pallets also linked us to previous artists of interest such as Kawamatta and Graham Hudson. The notion that they were ‘throwaway’ items that would usually be discarded added an interesting dimension to the results – we were using a normally bland, everyday industrial item to build new creations. These sculptures took on new shapes and broke the confines of their drab, habitual purpose. This theory reminded us of the meaning behind the Arte Povera movement which proved you could make high quality art out of any material and still be true to those materials.

After constructing with the pallets in the studio we decided to take them into a different setting with different lighting to see if we could give them a different feel. We took them into the controlled lighting studio first and strategically placed studio lighting to see how that would affect them. As a sculpture they became more interesting as the lights highlighted the negative space but what we found most fascinating was how when looking back at the photographs we had taken the scale of the pallets had become distorted to what they actually were. In the photographs the pallets looked huge, almost like skyscrapers. The lights changed the appearance of them dramatically.

After realising the potential of using different forms of light and different spaces we decided to experiment further by taking the pallets in the installation room, a small confined space with little light. Instead of stacking the pallets as we had done before this time we decided to try something different so we built a small tunnel in the room that wound round to a dead end. We decided to try this as we liked the way some of the corridors in the Libeskind Jewish Museum made you feel disorientated and claustrophobic and this was our small scale attempt at that. The tunnel inspiration also came from Monika Sosnowska who has an interesting way of making the dynamics of a room feel warped. When the tunnel was built we finally added a strong light into the middle of it to see the effect. The light added to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the tunnel as it meant that dark corners were being created strong shadows on the wall.

After playing with a strong light in the tunnel we wondered if it was possible to do the opposite, making the room appear larger rather than smaller. We hired out a data projector and a video camera and attached them to each other to create a ‘live view’ effect to see what would happen. We used these with the intention of making another way that the people entering the tunnel could interact with it, by seeing themselves walk around it in almost a CCTV style way. What we actually discovered from doing that was that if we filmed part of the pallets and then projected on the walls behind them we could construct more without physically moving the pallets. These ‘live view projections created steps and tunnels that didn’t’ actually exist; it made the confined space in the installation room appear massive. From these projections we took photos that by themselves created spatially interesting image.

From the projections we started to think about what we could do spatially without actually moving the pallets, this led us to make a series of proposals using Photoshop. We took photos of empty spaces and then made constructions in them using photos of pallets that we had already taken. This meant that we could be more creative with scale and locations. We also found that prints, sketches and to scale maquettes helped visualise our ideas.

By this time we were getting to grips with the main aims and objectives within our work and decided to focus on the more successful areas of our practice. By refining our sculpture, installation, projection and photography we aim to intrigue the viewer with our interventions with architecture, to create a spatial illusion in a 3 dimensional way that hasn’t been done before. We hope to challenge the viewers’ preconceptions of a space with our illusionistic use of media.