Publication to accompany the Installation Programme 01

Concourse Installation Programme

Dún Laoghaire Rathdown

2001

Essay by Sarah Glennie

Bedding Out     Katrina Maguire

Katrina Maguire’s response to the scale of the Concourse Space was the installation Bedding Out - a dramatic large-scale floor piece that took its inspiration from the traditional designs of formal gardens. In particular the piece took the form of a ‘Parterre’, a French gardening term that refers to the design of an area of ornamental beds. The form of this ‘Parterre’ was based on an original design taken from the historical gardening book, ‘Book of the Garden’ by McIntosh, 1853. However, instead of flowers and plants, the installation was made up of approximately 12,000 transparent plastic vessels, test tubes and petri dishes, filled with 19 dried herbs and spices, each chosen for their aesthetic qualities of colour, texture and smell to ensure a strong visual and sensual impact.

The audience’s interaction was central to Bedding Out - the installation offered different levels of engagement to the viewer, each drawing us enter a closer appreciation of the work. The smell of the herbs attracted our attention on entering the building before the piece could be seen. But then turning the corner from the entrance into the Concourse we were struck by the dramatic beauty of the mosaic laid across the floor of the space.  Parterres were originally designed to be viewed from the upper floors of a house and similarly the staff of the Council building were given a chance to fully appreciate the scale and design of Bedding Out as they could view it from above on their way up to the offices.

On the ground level there were walkways through the piece that invited the viewer to enter into the maze like space and encounter on a closer level the detail of the work and the different colours and textures of the herbs. This intimate, intricate experience counter-balanced the grand scale of the Concourse Space. This physical and sensual engagement by the viewer is central to Bedding Out which was conceived as both a strong visual statement and experiential environment - one which evoked memories of places beyond the council offices - a visit to a foreign souk; the sensuality of the orchid house in Botanical Gardens. The piece introduced to the cool, civic spaces of the council offices a sense of otherness - a sense of the sensual, natural and organic.

However, the natural elements of the work were contained within an intricate and ordered overall design. The historical references made to ornamental gardens also placed the work in the field of the control and ordering of our physical space, from or mastery over nature in gardening to grand civic architecture - of which the newly extended Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Councils offices is a contemporary example.

Time is a crucial element to the work. Immediately obvious to the viewer is the amount of time needed to prepare the materials for the installation. Each vessel was painstakingly filled with a designated herb, a process that happened in the artist studio, and was then transported to the Concourse Space where they were carefully laid out by the artist according to the design - a process of manual labour that is at odds with our increasingly digitalised and automated society. Friends helped Maguire to fill the vessels and she described this communal activity as being reminiscent of traditional communal crafts such as making a large tapestry. This process of careful making and ‘bedding out’ is as much part of the piece as the final installation.

The installation also required visitors who spent time with it, to pause and walk through the space, choosing a path, and spend time examining the colours, textures and smells of the different herbs.

The herbs and spices used in the installation have an inbuilt temporality as their colour and smell fade with prolonged exposure. This was an installation made only for this period of time in the Concourse Space and the boxing up of the vessels was a permanent end to physical existence of the work. However, like many temporary installations of this nature, it was not the end of the installation and this beautiful ephemeral piece continues to live through the documentation that exists and the memories of those that experienced it.