There are birds / Work in a day / Play with measurements / There are

Anne Tallentire (1949 - )

print, card and masking tape on paper

2020
  • About the work
    Location
    Country: UK
    City: London
    Place: Government Art Collection
    First presented in Anne Tallentire’s 2020 solo show As It Happens at Hollybush Gardens, these three
    series of four individually framed floorplans printed on Xerox paper and overlaid with coloured sticky
    tape and rectangular pieces of card could easily be overlooked as part of the building’s signage. In
    fact, the plans are illegible (when read as conventional floorplans), being mostly covered up by paper and tape and deriving from the artist’s home and a social housing development in Graz, Austria. In the exhibition’s accompanying booklet (Hollybush Gardens, issue 8), Tallentire reveals that the seemingly random formation of the overlay stems from the patterns made by paragraphs on pages of typescript. Acknowledging the parallel of architecture and language as regulatory systems hardwired into the practices of daily living, Tallentire confronts assumptions of legibility invested in conventional means of spatial and linguistic articulation by garbling any straightforward relation of the floorplans to
    a specific site (or text). The violence of the home is something Anne Tallentire seeks to resist. Toying with conventional means of spatial processing – floorplans, grids, paragraphs, collage – and emphasising process over product in a manner reminiscent of the Fluxus movement, her work enacts the conflictual relations of destabilisation and oppression between dwelling and its material framework. In so doing, it offers the potential for an alternative cognition of space, one which is open-ended and generative rather than closed, circumscribed and directive.
  • About the artist
    Anne Tallentire was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, but since 1984, has lived and worked in London. She is Professor Emerita at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where she previously taught Fine Art from the early 1990s to 2014. Tallentire has exhibited her work widely in the UK and internationally, including shows in London, Belfast, Dublin, Liverpool, Vienna and Paris. Solo exhibitions of her work in 2016 include 'As happens…' at Hollybush Gardens, London (2020); 'Plan (...)' at Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2019); and 'Shelter' at Nerve Centre and Eighty81, Londonderry; Ulster Museum, Belfast; FabLab Limerick, Limerick, Ireland (all 2016).
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  • Details
    Title
    There are birds / Work in a day / Play with measurements / There are
    Date
    2020
    Medium
    print, card and masking tape on paper
    Acquisition
    Purchased from Hollybush Gardens as part of the Northern Ireland Centenary, March 2021
    Provenance
    Hollybush Gardens; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2021
    GAC number
    18984