Sam Hartnett
An all-woman team of architects has created the sculpture Femmely Values, which won this year’s Brick Bay Folly project and is now on display at the Brick Bay Sculpture Trail.
Located at Brick Bay Wines, Snells Beach, near Matakana, New Zealand, the 2 km Trail features over 60 large-scale sculptures through the vineyard, native forest, and lakes.
The project invites young architects through a charitable trust, which has surplus revenue to help create new works.
This year, Claire Ford, Elise Cautley and Jennifer Gao rose to the challenge with a sculpture that reimagines weaving, using recycled and reused pinus radiata, equine canvas, stainless steel tension wire, steel rod and fixings, and paint.
It is the first time an all-woman team has won the competition.
Each of the three giant looms represents a stage of creating a woven piece: warp, weft, and work. ‘The three stages are much like the relationship of learning and teaching, where you learn the basics and then add more and more complexity,’ said Ford.
‘We really wanted to explore the concept of joy and how craft and language could be emphasised through colour,’ added Cautley. ‘We’ve got pinks that really talk a lot about the kind of feminism or Barbie-fication in the public sphere, then we’ve got the addition of blue, which speaks about the wider ideas of feminism through the LGBTQIA+ community. And the yellow adds to that as well. The purple is the official colour of International Women’s Day, which adds an extra element that really gives it some depth.’
They used compacted gravel for the foundation, to aid removal when the time comes, without disturbance to the ground.
Timber from the previous sculpture at the site, The Nest, was recycled for Femmely Values.
Brick Bay co-owner Richard Didsbury says the work is ‘absolutely spectacular, fun, joyous’ with ‘more colour than we’ve ever seen before at Brick Bay’.
Launch
Sam Hartnett
You may also like
