2017 will be a memorable year for the Victoria and Albert Museum as it completes its largest new building project in the museum for a century with the new Exhibition Road Building Project, details of which are currently on display alongside some of the work from the arts residency of Lain O’Connell.
There has been an aspiration to open up and use the courtyard off Exhibition Road that was previously hidden behind the Aston Webb Screen with a previous proposal by Daniel Libeskind for a dramatic new building, a model of which is on display upstairs in the Architecture Gallery of the Museum. In 2011, Amanda Levete won an architectural competition for a simpler scheme, to provide a new entrance, courtyard and subterranean gallery with a wide-span folded roof which will define this new space for temporary exhibitions. The project will provide a space for outdoor exhibitions and events alongside a new glass-fronted café and the architects are exploring the possibility of creating the first ceramic-tiled courtyard in the UK to reflect the terracotta facades of the adjacent buildings and of the collections of ceramics in the Museum itself. Construction work of the £49 million project started in January 2014 and is due to open to the public in early 2017.
During the project, the Museum will have three artists in residence, for a year at a time. The first is Laim O’Conner who studied at the London College of Communication and the Royal College of Art and was the artist in residence at the British Museum for their new building project. Liam’s aim is to create work that responds to both the building site and the collections in the museum. His work has developed a number of themes: one is the creation of contemporary casts of the building project, inspired by the Museum’s plaster cast collection.
A second is to create a scroll of drawings which records the construction process and the people involved in the project, and the third, in some ways the most imaginative, is Clay Hands, inspired by historic items in the collection but brought up to date with involvement of the workers who are creating the new building, The building workers on the construction site invest a huge part of their lives in the building project but when it is finished, their effort is hidden and forgotten about as they move onto another project. The sculptures the workers have created will be included in the V&A collections and that it is an opportunity for them to leave a permanent and human legacy in addition to the building they have created.
“I instructed the builders to create a series of hand-held clay sculptures. We used clay that was brought to the surface of the building site during the piling process. Both ceramic artists Nao Matsunaga and Matthew Raw kindly helped me turn this off site clay into conventional modelling clay through various processes, and afterwards fired the sculptures to transform them into terracotta.”
“I used to be a worker on site, many of my immediate and extended family are involved in construction, so I am always interested in construction sites and trying to find ways to document them through art. Instead of replicating the same method before, I am taking a fresh approach and focusing more on the people. I become more observant on the characters on the site instead of the construction itself, tracking movements of workers and moving cranes through drawing. My huge scroll drawing will capture all these repetition of movements and actions the builders go through.” (Liam O’Connor)
