Team activity where we had to select a place and a moment to develop - very open brief.I enjoyed the working together element of this brief. I feel that I was reasonably proactive in generating the team members and selected people that I was pretty certain I could work with and who would work well together.
Wanting to enhance the local community, we decided to develop one of a series of Urban Walks promoted by Wrexham Borough Council. At present the aim of these is to encourage personal fitness. However, we felt that several of the sites en-route could be developed visually to inform, entertain and 'lift the soul'.
We wanted to draw upon elements of the past, especially at the more historic sites, whilst also embracing Wrexham's increasingly multi-cultural present and future.
To divide the labour and partially resolve the difficulty of living at a distance from one another we decided to work on a different location each. I took the Dissenters' Graveyard on Rhos Ddu Road: an atmospheric but under-developed site that could become a haven, just off a busy road, where people could sit and reflect.
Research lead me to undertsand the history of the site. 'Dissenters' were a Christian group that emerged out of the Puritan movement of the English Civil War, developing views that took them outside of the established church. In the aftermath of the civil war an eminent local leader emerged: Morgan Llwyd. Llwyd was a preacher, philosopher and poet who published a book titled 'The Three Birds'. The birds in question being the Eagle ( representative of the state), the raven (the established church) and the dove (Dissenters). The book explores a dialogue between the three.
I took the motif of the three birds and developed a series of sculptural screen pieces, incorporating seating, that could be placed within the open space. These incorporate phrases related to dissent and free-thinking and have the effect of breaking up what is otherwise a fairly sparse space. Their construction utilises materials that look both to the past and to the contemporary.
Whilst the installations go some way to develop the site in the direction I seek, they need to be augmented by planting and further structures.However, this was ostensibly an exercise in team-work and joint pitch/presentaion. I believe that we worked pretty well together, supporting each other in terms of research and suggestions. We met regularly, as necessary, kept in touch via email, and used our time well. Inevitably, some were more conscientious, better organised and proactive than others but this did not impact negatively upon the end result.
I was fairly pleased with my role, taking the lead where necessary to co-ordinate and place deadlines, without, I hope, becoming too pushy and critical.
While our presentation was perfectly adequate, I think that it could have been a little more polished if we had engineered our time a little more effectively towards the end, giving us a chance to rehearse, shape and refine the pitch. But, we were amonst the first to present so time was pressing.
