This year I am collaborating with my partner, Griff (Andrew Griffiths) for Heat Exchange, and like Stephen, we are starting a new body of work following an exhausting winter during which we moved house and as yet have no studio.
During the summer we were inspired by World War II pill boxes around the coast of South West Wales, ruins that are both familiar and intriguing, concrete husks that mark a destination or turning point on a Sunday walk.
The bunkers are quietly disappearing, immersed by brambles and crumbling from the effects of westerly rainstorms. The architecture is modernist and brutal, ugly in aggressive symbolism but softened through time like fortified castles. They also represent security and protection and bare witness to history though never used as intended and therefore dysfunctional: spaces constructed within a few weeks that are now forgotten scars in the landscape.
These empty places are now spaces for our imagination and focal point for a challenging shared project…!
Catherine Fairgrieve
Catherine works across discipline boundaries, excited by the potential of combining traditional processes with new technologies. She is an artist and educator, and lives in Wales.
They’re a wonder – but surprisingly small looking. I guess they had to put up lots of them in a hurry? I remember visiting some in Australia and they always seemed to have tunnels connecting them, but this has made me realise that urgency does not allow for a warren of hidey-holes . We obviously had more time to over-engineer.