Studio Thadian Pillai

Mixed media
2009

Hide responds to the landscape context and collection of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the north of England.  Inspiring active participation, it is conceived as usable sculpture.  The work’s form is generated through the performed manipulation of a single plane of engineered material; it is a building block requiring no other.  It serves multiple, self-devised functions, including the discreet observation of the Park from within it.  In this way it is both ‘hide’ and ‘hidden’ within the context of the Park’s sculpture collection. 

As an ‘articulated topography’, Hide is directly influenced by the ground plane of the site and the climatic elements to which it is subject.  The changeable apertures it creates reference the theories of prospect/refuge and ‘the enclosure’.  The work subverts the eighteenth century concept of landscape as a subject to be viewed, making it instead a place to be performed and enacted.  Create-able, collapse-able, and erectable, it makes both participants and voyeurs of its audience.  Variously graceful, brutal and playful, the work’s meaning is informed by those whose engagement it inspires. 

Hide was commissioned by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and York St John University.  Thanks to Jonathan Baxter, Lynn Baxter, Sarah Staton and Barbara Tong.  Additional photography © copyright of Jonty Wilde.