Curatorial Statement

‘This weekend….?’ is a Cornwall wide, site-specific art project in Areas of outstanding Natural Beauty – (AONB) and/or an area owned by the National Trust in Cornwall. This project is run by BOSarts, a visual arts initiative that operates in partnership with the National Trust.

‘This weekend….?’ uses the immediate context of Cornwall to look at wider issues to do with ruralism - land use, conservation, tourism and the construction of cultural identity.   Twenty-seven percent of Cornwall is designated an AONB, while approximately seventy-five percent of the Cornish coast is owned by the National Trust. This project aims to critically assess the impact these designations have on the inhabitants of these sites, and invite wider audiences to explore the area, re-assessing and re-engaging.

Through place-based art practice and research, six temporary public art projects will appear across Cornwall for a limited duration – no longer than one weekend. The projects will occur on selected weekends through-out the months of August and September 2009.

‘This weekend….?’ is part of a wider critical investigation into the operations of the art world within the specific environment of Cornwall which might be typically described as remote, rural, inaccessible with disparate artistic communities. This project embraces multi-institutional/cross discipline collaboration, inaccessible scattered sites, designated statuses and aims to act as a bridge between different audiences and participants.

Two paradoxical models of site-specific art practice are explored through the ‘This weekend....?’ project, the transient and the embedded. Existing for no longer than a weekend, the art works will be made accessible through an interactive website and text messaging service alerting the public to the whereabouts of the work. The aim is to instigate a ‘flash mob’ style of audience engagement.

By contrast the artist themselves, are embedded in the site. This relationship is achieved through a residency style artist partnership with the site, the locale and the National Trust area warden. The relationships the artist forms with the site and the community will help build the art work into a local community’s mythology.

The aim of the project is to test whether an artist’s rooted relationship with the site and the use of new media in the marketing strategy can assist audience engagement and help form a legacy for temporary site-specific art, heightening its impact.

Audience engagement underpins the curatorial concept, therefore artists have been asked to consider how the art work is made and experienced, with their research permeating the project activity. The artist’s intensive research that emerges from a longer term relationship with the site will strongly inform the curatorial direction of the project as a whole.

The collaborations between the artists, the National Trust, the local community and the project team will create a unique and diverse project, setting a president for ambitious county-wide projects that while internationally significant are embedded in the local.