Tatton Park

Justine and myself have spent two days at RHS Tatton Park working on the first Collaboration of what will hopefully be many.

We both worked on projects for the Something Beautiful Commission as part of Cheshire Year of the Gardens 2008. Justine worked at Little Morton Hall, Rachel worked at Arley Hall.
Through these experiences it was decided that the RHS Show at Tatton Park would be the perfect platform for our first collaborative Commission.
We decided to use the most simple aspects of our work - for Justine this meant highlighting negative spaces within a structure, for Rachel this meant cutting wood into it's most simple form and sanding to get a perfect finish.
We decided a straight cut through each piece would provide the negative space and visually hold the sections together.
We knew that all the pieces would be brought together to make a whole, and we wanted the sculpture to interact with the show.

These images show our working space at the RHS Show, the work in progress, and Justine having a play.

Our brief was to create something site specific to the RHS Tatton show. Tatton gave us the tree trunks on the Friday before the show then Rachel worked furiously to cut and sand them in time for the show opening on Wednesday. I had never worked with wood in this way before and trusted Rachel on the wood front absolutely. We felt that a multi-component work would be the most effective way to create an interactive piece. This was a new way of working for Rachel. Combining wood discs with a linear white line provided us with flexibility in how to place the work in each garden. On Wednesday, after painting and oiling the discs, we approached several gardens with our idea and fortunately they were all really supportive.