Eastbury Manor House
The University of East London has become the newest resident of the Eastbury Manor House. Thanks to the collaboration between UEL and Eastbury Manor House, the students of Arts, Technologies and Innovations can now exhibit their work at a new location. The UEL students now have opportunities throughout the year to collaborate the Manor House and explore the concept of “Nature Of Places” to base their projects on, while expanding their horizons of their skills. Also, this programme allows students, as well as the locals, to discuss their opinions on heritage and where it stands in the community. “The collaboration aims to promote a commitment to civic engagement by establishing a team of bridge builders that can transcend the boundaries between the academy and the local community. The mission of the team is to deploy a series of innovative pedagogic Art and Design projects that investigate and explore the themes and strategies of 'Place Making' in and around Eastbury Manor. This will enable Art & Design professionals, local industry and our students; to foster powerful real-world community connections, develop employability skills and nurture relationships to engender active citizenship enabling vital civil democracy.” - Dr Garry Doherty, UEL Atelier Project Manager On Wednesday 7th March, a new exhibition began at the Manor House residency. This new showcase consisted of a series of exhibitions, which occupied a series of rooms and outside spaces within the manor. The reception hosted many guests from the University and anyone else interested in attending.
In one of the said rooms, our reporters found themselves in an installation of a sculpture which was titled ‘Dying Forêst’. This part of the exhibition was inspired by the destruction of nature caused by the human race.
This room, ‘Dying Forest', consisted of abandoned Christmas trees that were saved from the streets of London and brought back together into the room to mimic a real Forrest-like atmosphere. The whole point of this was to present the social questions and cultural consumption:
“As you squeeze between the trees needles drop all around you and you realise that the trees are dead and forgotten. A mass grave of formerly living things, killed for short-lived human entertainment”
Samuel Zealey’s sculpture re-assessed the connection between architecture and the natural world. This relationship illustrates a much more evocative ‘public art’ which embodies the spirit, meaning and purpose of art in the first place.
The next room presented a various mixture of sculptural and film installations This room was organised by Simona Pesce Linger to celebrate the liberation of women. It also marked the 100th anniversary of the women’s vote. This work is part of the year long project which is called ‘Her Story' from the council of Barking and Dagenham. This project celebrated the democratic milestone and the fight for equality, and more importantly, it also acknowledged the women that are making major changes in the world, as well as our community, even now.
Through a number of sculptural and film installations, this part of the exhibition explored the themes of inequality and disproportionate discrimination against female artists and how they continue to face these obstacles in the art world even now. The National Museum report on gender disparity shows 65-70% of art students are female. However, women, on average, make up less than 30% of artists shown in public galleries.
“We must Linger on the memory, but also Linger on our strength to change attitudes around the world.”
The third room was called ‘A Memory Of Place’ which acquired the works from a team of people that lead the of Foundation Architecture & Design students and tutors. They have led some of the workshops that have developed analytical processes like; surveying the space, observing its historic residue in terms of sensing its atmosphere, texture, smells, light conditions and the material evidence that describes layers of physical history.
This enabled the experience of the historic nature of the site, being constructed into a visual narrative that demonstrated how important heritage writhing the Eastbury Manor House is. Many of the students found bits and pieces of themselves in each room as each of the themes in the rooms were very inspiring in terms of details like; material, textures of wear, signs of repair and aging. All the students observed the elements very carefully and drew it to scale 1:1 into econometric drawing in order to reveal “A Sense of Place”
The last room was titled ‘This Must be The Place’. This room mapped the historic territories of Eastbury Manor and this was presented by walking the various footpaths, pathways, passages, underpasses and bridges which can be found hidden in the commonplace. Rob Reed’s paintings illustrated this sense of tranquillity from the environment and how that had an effects on humanity.
The resonance of this historic site was built upon each other in unrealized typologies which can sometimes perplex people even in the present. His project identified all these lost spaces, questioning their need to be valued into a contemporary communal plan.
