The first project curated by Helen Nisbet in her role as CEO & Artistic Director of Cromwell Place is measurement plan, a temporary installation by Anne Tallentire.
This temporary installation in their Lavery Studio will unfold and evolve over the course of seven days from 9th – 15th October, culminating in a durational performance on 14th October, before a final iteration of the work on 15th October. The project gives an indication of Helen Nisbet’s curatorial and organisational thinking as her work unfolds over the next year.
It consists of a floor installation, tape drawing, assembled sculpture and wall-based work. Perfectly replicating the floor plan of the 1970s housing estate where she lives, Tallentire responds to the physical space of the Lavery studio, using its dimensions to contain a 1:1 scale representation of her home. Using tape as a drawing material, attached to the ubiquitous construction protection material Correx, Tallentire not only considers her living conditions but also introduces wider questions around housing provision and what is deemed acceptable.
Tallentire’s tape drawings speak to the mechanisms of ordinary life, they invite us into clearly determined physical spaces to imagine what they might feel like for others. Alongside a consideration of the everyday, the work acknowledges the universal, political structures that dictate how we and other people live and can be constrained.
Speaking to processes of thinking and construction this floor drawing will be materially worked and unworked to produce several iterations, culminating in the production of stacked assemblages. A number of speculative plan wall works installed in the space using graphic plastic tape will present a more improvised style of mark-making typical of Tallentire’s employment of found objects, in this case, a fragment of a wooden pallet.
Like a poet, Tallentire carefully holds and determines what is used and what is taken away. measurement plan will unfold collaboratively and performatively, responding to the flux and precarity of social and political life. The project is manifested by Tallentire working in collaboration with her technicians, performers and the audience who will come and go during the week. Over time their footprints, left on the floor, will add imprints critical to the work’s evolution before the final dismantling.
The work will culminate in a durational performance on Saturday, 14th October from 2 – 5pm
On 14th October from 6 – 7pm, Anne Tallentire will be in conversation with Mary Cremin, Head of Programming at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).
This is the first project curated by Helen Nisbet in her new role as CEO & Artistic Director at Cromwell Place and gives an indication of her curatorial and organisational thinking as her work unfolds over the next year.
Anne Tallentire: measurement plan, curated by Helen Nisbet, CEO and Artistic Director, Cromwell Place 9th – 15th October 2023
About the artist
Anne Tallentire (b. 1949, County Armagh, Northern Ireland) lives and works in London, UK. Her practice encompasses moving image, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Through visual and textual interrogation of everyday materials and structures, Tallentire’s work seeks to reveal systems that shape the built environment and the economics of labour. Her recent work has examined geographical dislocation and demarcation in relation to infrastructure. From 1993, Tallentire has also made work as part of the artist duo work-seth/tallentire with artist John Seth. She is also the co-organiser, with Chris Fite-Wassilak, of the peripatetic event series ‘hmn’.
Recent solo exhibitions include Material Distance, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2022); But this material…, The MAC, Belfast, Ireland (2021); As happens, Hollybush Gardens, London (2020); Plan (…), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2019); Shelter, Nerve Centre and Eighty81, both Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and FabLab Limerick, Ireland (all 2016); This and Other Things, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); and Irish Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale (1999), among others. Group exhibitions include Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City, curated by Lubaina Himid, Southampton City Art Gallery (2023); An Insular Rococo, Hollybush Gardens, London (2022); IMMA 30 Setting Out, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2021); REFUGE, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2021); Extrospection, Pi Artworks, London (2020); Truth: 24 Frames Per Second, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2017); Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain, Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Publish and be Damned, ICA, London (2013); and Anthology – for Lucy Reynolds, Film in Space, Camden Art Centre, London (2012), among others.
Her work is held in significant public collections, including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Government Art Collection, UK; British Council Collection; and Arts Council Ireland Collection. In 2018 Tallentire was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists; in 2022, Tallentire was the recipient of a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. She is Professor Emerita at Central Saint Martins, where she taught from the early 1990s to 2014.
About Cromwell Place
Opened in 2020 and set within five Grade II listed Victorian townhouses in South Kensington, Cromwell Place is one of London’s most exciting arts destinations, offering a year-round programme of diverse exhibitions open to the public across 14 gallery spaces, alongside a restaurant and bar.
As a membership organisation and innovative arts hub, it also provides an environment in which galleries, collectors, dealers, curators, and arts professionals can collaborate and flourish together. In addition to the gallery spaces, members have access to art storage, viewing rooms, workspaces, and meeting rooms.
