Agora

teeny tiny ruins

The final year of 3D Design and Craft is where you’re let loose to find your own creative niche. If you’d told me in September I would be making miniature ruins for fairies as an antidote to the blandness of our urban environment (amongst other things) I would have thought you were quite mad.

Yet I’ve always worked small-scale and have an affinity with overlooked or marginalised structures, derelict sites and weeds. Over the years I’ve created treasure hunts of old ceramic projects across Brighton, rewarding (and perhaps puzzling) the perceptive.

‘Agora’ is the working/public title for my actual final year project ’21st Century Sidh’.

A sidh (‘shee’) is a mound or tree often found on its own in a field in Ireland or Scotland. Superstition says a prehistoric race of magicians and craftsmen (the ‘Tuatha de‘) retreated to the Sidh when they lost to the invading warrior Celts. The Tuatha de/Aos Si now live in these structures and even today, few people will disturb them, just in case… Farmers will plough around and even major roads have been diverted in the 21st Century to avoid a fairy tree.

Thomas Heatherwick, in his book ‘Humanize’ rails against the prevalence of bland life-size architecture, with public art almost as a bandaid on top.

Heatherwick argues that not only is this aesthetically a problem, but psychologically it stresses people out (we’re a visual species and need something to latch onto!). Environmentally, the lack of emotional connection to modern buildings leads to frequent demolition and equally bland replacements, meanwhile we preserve and fossilise draughty listed buildings because they’re the only interesting architecture we have left!

Miniatures have the power to let people project their imagination into a tiny world and walk around.

The ruins I create are intended to be a reef and a sanctuary, offering some visual reprieve for the eyes in a monotonous urban world.

They are also intended to attach to existing structures, in gaps of walls or even just an unused space, to help add value to existing structures and slow down their march to obsolescence and demolition.

The aim is, by creating a fascinating, mysterious and possibly even slightly sinister ruins, a new mythology can be created in a world without trees but with plenty of rubble.

Don’t disturb the Aos Si.

Just in case ..

“Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren’t go a-huntingFor fear of little men” William Allingham