Wassail

Gubb, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2412-7412 (2018) Wassail. [Artefact]

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Abstract

A series of eight permanent public sculptures. Commissioned by Berkeley Homes to be sited around their ‘Vista’ development on the Nine Elms, Battersea, the specific focus of the commission was to create way markers for the site. The logic to my approach was that anything can act as a way marker – a tree-stump, a bent lamppost – essentially anything that’s specific and unique to a site. Seven works were developed for the site, to be set in to the hardscaping at specific points, each of which was thematically developed from research in to the history of the borough. An eighth work was also commissioned to be sited on a railway arch at the rear of the site. This was developed, thematically, from the same research that was undertaken in to the history of the borough. The specific things being referenced through the works are:

• Battersea formerly being a lavender-farming area, pre-industrial revolution.
• Pink Floyd’s classic ‘Animals’ album cover, featuring a pig flying between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station (which is directly to the rear of the site).
• The work of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
• The formation of the Workers Educational Association in a terraced house in the borough in 1903.
• The aviation history of the Short Brothers, formerly based on the gasworks the rear of the Vista site.
• The filming of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ video on a pier of Battersea Park.
• The presence of the ‘Pleasure Gardens’ in Battersea Park during the 1951 ‘Festival of Britain’.
• The discovery of the Seax of Beagnoth in the River Thames at Battersea – a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon knife containing the only known complete inscription of the twenty-eight letter Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet.

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