"Refraction" 2010
site specific installation, recycled wine bottles, green oak and galvanised tensioned steel cable
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When we started work on the Recycled House in January 2010 the compromise was that I would have to give up making art work for a period of time, and also as the project included a new studio in the garden I gave up my studio in Peckham. Working on the renovation became a cycle of work, cleaning up the house and the site and spending evenings exhausted and a little brain-dead.
This project is something I have wanted to do for some time, and apart from the sustainability aspects I have also been particularly inspired by the light in this coastal environment and using it as effectively as possible in the house and studio. This has been a great creative challenge but right from the beginning I missed making work and had thoughts of creating a site specific installation during the project.
I wanted to bring a number of things together - the light, recycling and reclaiming materials - to make something which would be visible and in some way engage the local community. My initial idea was to collect all the bottles from the wine drunk during the project, and create a recycled sculpture. I like building structures but don't always have enough knowledge as to how to realise them in a practical sense, and in this respect John helped me resolve the technical issues and create a workable structure using local green oak and tensioned wire cables.
I debated whether to laboriously remove all the labels and the capsules from the bottles - deciding in the end that they should go in as they were and the lables would degrade over time. The bottles were placed in the structure in double rows, with the necks overlapping, again this brought up questions as to how precise this needed to be, and whether larger or oddly shaped bottles should be used. Champagne and sparkling wine bottles were awkward, but I decided to go with whatever turned up and let the structure accommodate them.
Early on my idea was to use only the bottles we or visitors drank, but it quickly became clear that it would take years to fill the structure with somewhere between 1500 and 1800 bottles. I decided to include wine bottles recycled in Camber, from the local hotel and bottle bank, and from local residents.
In September we opened the house as part of English Heritage Open Days Eco Houses, and again in October as part of the 10:10 campaign. In some ways the installation has created greater interest than the house, but many people have felt that it works as a symbol of what we are doing with the house as well as an artwork.