Haggard Caravan was an experimental sound and sculpture installation conceived in response to The Hepworth Wakefield’s space The Calder.
The project stemmed from an ongoing collaboration between artists Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti and Stefan Tcherepnin who use collaborative strategies to disrupt and reflect on the processes of artistic creation.
For Haggard Caravan, Madison, Rossetti and Tcherepnin collaborated with Jeanne Graff, Flavio Merlo, Gregory Ruppe and William Z Saunders, who complete the line-up for the group’s band. In their site-specific projects, the group make use of a wide range of media including sculpture, video, painting, music, text and photography. They engage with the gallery as both a production studio and a live space in which they play with temporal aspects of the exhibition experience.
Produced over ten days, Haggard Caravan was made in direct response to the architecture of The Calder, its riverside setting and the histories embedded in the reclaimed building.
A 30-metre long cement ‘relief’ in which debris collected each day was embedded in its surface. The work gradually obscured the main bank of windows in the space, redefining the threshold between inside and out. Intensely illuminated wire mesh sculptures further played on this idea of sculpture as a filter, drawing visitors’ attention to the various gallery infrastructures.
Haggard Caravan reflected on different sources of energy present in and around the gallery, in particular the kinetic energy of the river Calder. A major element of the installation was a new immersive site-specific audio piece that combined sound created with a Serge Modular Synthesizer and field recordings of otherwise neglected or ‘discarded’ sounds taken in Wakefield.
Exhibition supported by
Co-commissioned with The Modern Institute, Glasgow.
Part of Glasgow International 2014.
Supported by Pro Helvetia, Basel Kultur and the Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain
