PARK is an annual event which has been hosted by Wimbledon College of Arts in Cannizaro Park since the 1970s. The show offers students the opportunity to work site-specifically, and to develop their work within the context of a group show. This year, for the first time, PARK expands beyond the park to respond to sites within Wimbledon town centre and the college campus.  The projects within PARK 16 are typically diverse in their materials, intention and scale, with artists working with sound, photography, film, found objects, installation, performance and sculpture. The show is accompanied by a map and a website, http://parksixteen.wix.com/home, which contains documentation and supporting material for each project. 

 

DevineMorison take the arcadian fiction of Cannizaro as their starting point. Transporting Paradise involves continuously moving and displaying a neon sign within a removal van. The ideal of ‘paradise’ is conveyed rather than located. Zoe Wheeler invites visitors to locate The Lost Tiles of Cannizaro, so completing an image to be collected piece-by-piece. Nic Evans uses the terrain the park as a setting for The Game, a contest between two players that lasts for the duration of the day but that represents vast territories and aeon.  Alistair Blake’s Black and Grey Shape resists representation, while Gina Price’s Beech, Oak, Mahogany makes use of a range of ersatz materials that mimic the authentic appeal of wood. The authenticity of a first-person narrative is questioned by Tabitha Sutherland within Old Wrapped Scallion. The story of her performer is spoken by a young woman, while he sits in silence. Two voices recognize the colour green in Leonie Brandner’s Almost Green or Are You Still Here?, while the cut-out cartoon characters of Aaron Dawson Riley’s Go BACK Inside: We’re Fighting! approximate the pixel-thin space from which they’re borrowed. Tim Alexander invites visitors to consider the aesthetics of the spatial experience of the park. Using  Humphrey Repton’s Eighteenth Century ideals, The Way I See Our View makes use of social media to share and rate pictures of Cannizaro. Melanie Twigger’s Junk Yard Cabbage Patch embeds  plastic toy foods within the soil of the herb garden near India Gabb’s Clamped Flowers. Both works explore the relationship between nature and artificiality that is always in tension within the Park. 

 

Transforming china from the librarian’s kitchen into percussion and recording it being played, Susan Walker creates an immersive rain-like acoustic environment for Wimbledon Library’s entrance area. Naomi Avsec’s Poetry Shrine: Triple Moon Goddess makes use of recycled books and collage to set up a celebratory space in which to appreciate poetry, while Lizzie Masterton’s ASMR There Are Some Eyes That Can Eat You recounts post-modern fairy tales and creates a private, meditative ASMR sensation. Katherine Dwyer’s officious performers ask visitors to question the authority of The Artistic Agency of the Paperwork Executive. Luc Wilkinson displays photographs and sounds from the end of the world. 

 

Yuen-Ying Lam’s My Affectionate Ball Provides Safety and Comfort and Encourages Competence and Self-Reliance, a soft two-meter diameter ball, rolls throughout the mall inviting visitors to Centre Court Shopping to take a moment to relax. At Dundonald Recreation Ground, Lisa J Wood’s performance welcomes visitors through an act of cleaning. Renata Mahmoud’s Telling the Bees mournfully recounts rituals associated with memory and death. 

 

Finally, Antony Dixon has asked fourteen fellow art students to make casts from sites around Wimbledon, and to embed each cast with a fragment of text or image that they’ve found themselves. Copies of these fragments can be found at each site, marked within the PARK 16 map which can be found on the website and will be available at each of the PARK sites.

 

Wimbledon College of Arts would like to thank Merton Council for their generous support and assistance again this year. PARK 16 is curated by Juliet Haysom.