2002 Side Street
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“The street is a place for things to happen, a film set for real life, a meeting place, an escape, a place for contemplation, a place to eat, a lunch break, a dinner date, a rendezvous. It is a walk, a short-cut, a passage to the river Thames. It is a meditation, a memory, a moment.”
‘Side Street’ is 80-metres long and seven metres high. There are three sections to the street. In the first section, there are four recessed monumental slate engravings from Heron’s current series of drawings entitled Elements. A mirrored etched glass wall the Reflecting-wall‘ brings reflected light into the covered entrance and enables views around the corner. The roof is designed to create shafts of light, which move along the street during the day.
In the monograph published by Warwick University for Heron’s exhibition at The Mead Gallery the same year, Caroline Collier wrote:
Susanna Heron’s strength lies in her singular exploration of the constitution of works of art and the distinctions between art, craft, architecture and design. She has analysed with originality the relationship in art between the object and the potential for unpredictable ’visual events’ that happen later and are never repeated. In this her perception of sculpture is as live event, as process, always in the present and with the potential to be ignored, the meaning left dormant. Shadow and reflection are as vital as matter, chance more valid than prescription. Her independent combination of seriousness and wit has allowed her to make a body of work not confined by conventions or hierarchies but working in between or underneath them to disrupt notions of the obviously monumental and to put across the values of accumulation, of small details, apparent co-incidences and the fleeting instant:
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)*
TS Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)
Located at City Inn, Westminster. Dimensions are 6 m height x 6 m width x 80 m long.
With architects Bennetts Associates, client City Inn Ltd and art agent Modus Operandi, artists project manager Mary Hogben.
