'Outlook', 2006

Installations at

Derby Museum & Art Gallery

Pickford’s House Museum, Derby

The Architecture Centre, Bristol

The first thing many people do when they walk into a room is to go and look out of the window. ‘Outlook’ consisted of site-specific installations for galleries at Derby Museum & Art Gallery and the Architecture Centre Bristol which by ‘interfering’ with the space and its function, focused on how people navigate a room in order to look outside.

The installations suggested the connotations and implications of inside and outside, containment and freedom, control and free-fall, safety and ambition, belonging and not. The work unsettled the sense of the gallery being a passive space for showing, as it utilised it as an integral part.

The theme of ‘Outlook’ continued as a site-specific installation for the garden of Pickford’s House Museum, which has many fine windows, architecturally and historically defining the building.

A series of freestanding steel ‘windows’ were mounted on poles in the box-hedged borders. They mimicked the scale and hierarchy of the house’s windows, which change in relation to who would have been looking through them at the time the house was built. The large hall and drawing room windows afford a much better outlook than the tiny attic bedroom windows.

It is a playful comment on neo-classical architecture and on how life must have been in the past for at least some (women, servants) – quite restrictive, class ridden and inward looking.

‘Outlook’ continued the artist’s exploration of the boundaries between sculpture, architectural features and functional objects.

All images © Gillian Brent