March 2024

YARAT Education: TALK BY ARTIST AND PHOTOGRAPHER ELEANOR WRIGHT (UK)

27 Jun - 28 Jun 13

Artist Talk

Eleanor Wright (UK)

27 JUNE 2013


YARAT Contemporary Art Space invites you to take part in the artist talk given by the British artist and photographer Eleanor Wright on 27th  June at 17:00 (location: not yet finalised).

http://www.eleanorwright.net/

Eleanor Wright works across media, including large-scale installations, sculptures, prints and sound works. She is exploring the relationship between sculpture, architecture and built environments and the disparity between virtually designed objects and their physical renditions.

Wright is interested in the built environment being used to initiate urban renewal through city branding, particularly through the use of civic iconography. This can take the form of a logo, statue, bridge or building, anything that can be configured to project outwards, to potential visitors and investors. A building acting as symbol is by no means new (think of St Paul's Cathedral or the Vatican), but in recent years it has become an established, even necessary part of leisure and tourism led regeneration policy. A prime example is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, the museum responsible for initiating the so-called 'Bilbao effect'. Completed in 1997 the building is widely known for revitalizing a declining area and placing the city on the world tourist map.

Over the past year Wright has been researching the architecture and product designs of Zaha Hadid. Hadid's practice is at the forefront of computer-aided design in architecture and she is widely considered a prime architect of the digital age.

Wright regularly makes use of materials that are inherently functional, a quality that she exposes or masks in varying degrees depending on how the material is treated. Recently she has been constructing a series of large floor mats made up of interwoven cut pieces of welding-grade PVC, rubber and magnetic sheeting. Being drawn to sheet materials that are stored and distributed on a roll, she makes use of their versatility in terms of the multiple ways in which they can be manipulated and re-worked.

Wright is interested in the relationship between the different architectural styles and massive building commissions that characterise so many modern cityscapes; from medieval to soviet to contemporary, what impact is the recent regeneration of Baku having on its global identity.


27 June at 17:00

(Location: not yet finalised)


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