Studio Thadian Pillai

These works form part of the output of a three-month residency commissioned by the contemporary art gallery Firstsite, based in Colchester, England's oldest recorded town.  The residency explored the spatial and temporal relationship between the gallery’s then location within an historic listed building, and its proposed new venue designed by Raphael Viñoly Architects.  The works address surface treatment, materials’ technology and the nature of the 'boundary'; they suggest that beyond the duality of intellect and intuition there exist only edges, and a ‘one-ness’ that connects us with a total environment. 

A written Manifesto formed part of the residency exhibition:
‘The landscape of firstsite:newsite must be a pioneer.  It must hold in its possession the luminous body of the new building.  It must act as mediator between architecture and nature, and between architecture and audience. Not simply another landscape with art; rather through materials’ innovation and layers of meaning, it must be a landscape as art, and that art, a collective transformation.  The landscape must facilitate dialogue: between the prime signifier of the new building and its landscape context; and between the total environment and its people.  Firstsite must be unequivocally a landscape as event, destination and experience.’