Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project

The Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project is conceived as providing the opportunity for invited artists to make work that can be seen in terms of a multi-faceted landscape model, using and connecting ideas which the garden invokes, makes possible and provokes.
The project will take place in six parts of which five exhibitions have already taken place: Ideas Travel Faster than Light (co-curated with Jasone Miranda-Bilbao), Notes of an Urban Pedestrian (co-curated with Clare Stent), 2019, Group Portrait with Garden, 2018, En Plein Air, 2015, Changeable Conditions, 2012.
With thanks to the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Committee and Goodenough College.
-Clair Joy
Ideas travel faster than light, 2020
Co-curated by Clair Joy and Jasone Miranda-Bilbao

September 26th to 29th, 11am – 4pm
Ideas travel faster than light is an ongoing project initiated by Jasone Miranda-Bilbao. It began in 2015 with an invitation to nine artists working in Spain, UK and the US to submit proposals for new works, together with instructions of how to make them, and nine artists based in India to produce them according to their interpretation and understanding. The current exhibition, collaborating with the artist Clair Joy as part of the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project (initiated by her in 2012) constitutes the second edition of Ideas travel faster than light with Jasone inviting ten artists from India and Clair inviting ten artists/collaborations from the UK and Canada. It brings the idea and question of the complex material connection between places, people and shared space on a global scale to the garden.
As a modus operandi that sets up relations at distance, this exhibition could not have been better timed, and yet, it does not claim to point at the injustices of the world nor to offer a solution to the pressing problems that face us. Its relation to aesthetics and to what lies behind the artwork is somewhat different. It constitutes a relational configuration that stretches and contracts and re-addresses the balance between the work of art and the ideas that lie behind it in a way that does not give authority to the power of one mode of production over the power of the other.
Amikam Toren – Chandan Gomes
Anne Hardy – Sujit Mallik
David Batchelor – Achia Anzi
Calum F. Kerr – Gangan Singh
International Lawns – Vaibhav Raj Shah
Jo Stockham – Tapan Moharana
Naomi Salaman – Charmi Gada Shah
Oona Grimes & Tony Grisoni – Muskaan Singh
Ruth Maclennan – Yogesh Barve
Swapnaa Tamhane – Nilanjana Nandy
Further information about the works made for this exhibition in response to the instructions given by artists working in India can be downloaded by clicking the links below.
Notes of an Urban Pedestrian, 2019
Curated by Clare Stent and Clair Joy
3 – 6 October 2019
Anna Best, Alexandra Fontoura, Ellie Irons, Clair Joy, Kubra Khadema, PolakvanBekkum, Hermoine Spriggs, Clare Stent
How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks. From Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, 1927
Taking Virginia Woolf’s text ‘Street Haunting’ about walking through and observing the city as a starting point, artists have been invited to exhibit in the garden of Mecklenburgh Square as part of the Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project. Woolf lived for a short period in the square during WWII. Artists included can be seen to identify with the flâneur, psychogeography, the political, public space and the communal. Each artist’s work engages and responds to the urban in different ways.
Alexandra Fontoura, The Name of the Game, 2019, Nard wooden game, B&W photos, 2 tables, 2 chairs
Anna Best, Occasional Sights, 2002, Printed book
Clair Joy, Canopy (Beijing–Rio de Janeiro–London–Hong Kong), 2019, Oil on canvas
Clare Stent, City of London Inventory, 2002, Pen on paper, City of London Inventory, 2012, Pen on paper
Ellie Irons, Feral Landscape Typologies, 2015–2016, Colour photographs
Hermione Spriggs, SILENT ROAR, 2019, Documentation, mixed media, Early Roars (youtube lions) video, 10 mins.
Kubra Khademi, Armor, 2016, Video, 3 mins, Kubra and Pedestrian Sign, 2016, Video, 4.5 mins.
PolakVanBekkum, The City as Performative Object, 2017, Video, 20 mins.
Group Portrait with Garden, 2018
Curated by Clair Joy
September 6–9, 2018
Perienne Christian, Barbara Einzig, Benedict Ernst and Helen Morse-Palmer, David George, Alison Gill, Clair Joy, Florian Roithmayr, Karin Ruggaber and Anne Ryan, Clare Stent, Suzanne Treister
Taking as a starting point the communal nature of the garden, invited artists explore and draw on ideas to do with shared space and communality within many varied spheres such as technology, history, the unconscious, popular culture and nature. Works in the exhibition connect to the garden itself, responding to the multi-levelled experience in different ways, opening up ideas and possibilities in relation to wider connections in terms of shared space and communality.
Alison Gill, Regenerator (Utopia n), 2015
Barbara Einzig, Wilderness and the Garden, Daily poetry reading
Benedict Ernst and Helen Morse-Palmer, Landscape Painting, 2017
Clair Joy, Canopy (Damascus–Tirana–Berlin–Toronto), 2016, Oil on canvas
Clare Stent, Host, 2018, Digital photographs and plexiglass
David George, from the Backwater series, 2012, Photographic prints
Florian Roithmayr, EndStart, 2018, Concrete and steel
Karin Ruggaber and Anne Ryan, ‘A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas with Sirens on the Rocks’ after Charles Francois Lacroix de Marseille (A Fountain), 2018
Perienne Christian, from Phantasmagoria – Dream Drawings, 2010
Suzanne Treister, from Public Notices, 2018
En Plein Air, 2015
Curated by Clair Joy
September 5–8, 2015
Bill Burns, Rebecca Byrne, Liz Elton, Cecile Johnson-Soliz, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Clair Joy, Onya McCausland, Selma Parlour, Barbara Pfenningstorff, Hilary Powell, Kathy Prendergast, Babette Semmer, Tom Wolseley
In contemporary philosophical and geographical thought, space and time are not separate entities but interconnected and mutually defining. Configurations of space and time are unpredictable because they are always changing in ways that are difficult to anticipate. This unpredictable configuration is how the concept of ‘place’ is now understood. Because of the associations between ideas of landscape and place, this exhibition proposes that landscape in art also reflects these new understandings. The artists exhibiting in En Plein Air can be seen to invoke different scales of inter-relatedness, a sense of activity or an unpredictability that reflects and relates to new ideas about landscape.
Barbara Pfenningstorff, Mecklenburgh Square Non-site, 2015, Oil on canvas
Bill Burns, 0800 FAUNAFLORA, 2008; Hilary Powell, Urban Alchemy, 2015
Cecile Johnson-Soliz, Circular Lines, 2015, Newsprint, gloss paint, wood
Clair Joy, Canopy (Tehran–Oslo), 2015, Oil on canvas
Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Public Notice, 2015
Kathy Prendergast, Moth, 2015, Fabric
Liz Elton, Black and Blue, 2014, Water based paint on bio-degradable material/ Flowered, 2015, Acrylic on plastic
Onya McCausland, Red Line, 2015, Earth sediment from the River Fleet
R: Babette Semmer, Planetarium, 2014; L: Rebecca Byrne, Portals (detail), 2015
Selma Parlour, Big Bang, 2014, Oil on linen
Tom Wolseley, from Urban Forest, Photographic prints on aluminium
Changeable Conditions, 2012
Curated by Clair Joy
October 11–14, 2012
Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings, Veronique Chance, Rosy Head, Clair Joy, Mike Marshall, Jasone Miranda-Bilbao, Janette Parris and Tariq Alvi and Chris Gregory, Katie Pratt, Giorgio Sadotti, Kate Smith, Clare Stent, Liz Wright
Lunchtime running performance by Veronique Chance 1 o’clock everyday.
The processes, activities and space of the garden provide starting points, or an element of montage, for the work exhibited. Changeable Conditions takes the idea of the landscape connection with weather as a starting point for inviting artists whose work uses formal changeability or unpredictability that can be seen to allude to those forces in wider spheres. Other artists create and focus more overtly on changes in perception and political change as their subject.
Outside of Outside, 2013
Invited by Clair Joy, Giorgio Sadotti, Liz Wright
Exhibition design Giorgio Sadotti
26–27 October, 2013
Rachal Bradley, Judith Dean, Machiko Edmondson, Ella Finer / Kitty Finer, Lucy Gunning, Clair Joy, Matt Hale, Simon Liddiment, Matthew Richardson, Giorgio Sadotti, Rebecca Scott, Jack Strange, Elizabeth Wright
