Anna Barham
17 - 20 May 2007
ANNA BARHAM
17th - 20th May 2007
Private View Thursday 6-9pm by invitation only.
Opening Hours:
Friday 18th 11-9pm, Saturday 19th 11-7pm & Sunday 20th 11-7pm
Four is pleased to present Anna Barham at the Interior Design Fair + Art 2007 at the RDS, Ballsbridge.
I found a picture in a book of 9 Roman columns which look as though they were all that was left of a group of buildings, with the caption: In 1827 the ruins of Leptis Magna, Libya, were re-erected in the gardens of King George IV at Virginia Water. I was fascinated by this small image and the world that began to grow in my mind from its frame.
The book tells that 37 columns, 10 capitals, 25 pedestals, 10 pieces of cornice, 5 inscribed slabs and some fragments of sculpture were brought to England in 1818 from the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna. The city had been buried and preserved under the hourglass of Saharan sand since it was abandoned in the 5th century after the invasion of the Vandals. The stones were brought to England by the then consul-general in Tripoli, Colonel Warrington, supposedly as a diplomatic gift to the Prince Regent from the Bashaw of Tripoli. The three tallest columns that he had removed from the sand were too big for the ship and were left on the beach at Leptis where they apparently still lie. The pieces of stone that did travel to England spent the next eight years in the forecourt of the British Museum but were finally used to create a folly in the royal family’s private estate at Virginia Water by the royal architect Jeffrey Wyattville. Instead of arranging the stones in their original formation to faithfully recreate whatever building they had come from, or using them to create the ruins of a single imagined building, he arranged them to suggest a section of a city that could be wandered through.
I visited Virginia Water with no more knowledge of what it would look like than the picture in the book which was quite tightly framed and didn’t give much away. I had developed an image in my mind of what the surroundings would look like and had assumed that there would be a lot more of the ruins, that the photograph represented only a small section. In fact there isn’t much more, but the site is arranged very cleverly, making you imagine that there is a city beyond. You can’t walk through it anymore as the site has been enclosed by iron railings since the 1950s. Ruins invite you to fill in the gaps and imagine what they might have been, to project your own fantasy onto them. Even seeing the reality rather than a photo is still to see something incomplete – that has its own off-screen or out-of-frame. The railings add to this sense of beyond, creating another layer of separation from the past and turning them into ruined ruins.
It struck me that the dismantling and rearrangement of the stones was like an anagram. The two structures were equivalent in their being comprised of the same blocks, but the sense created by the two arrangements was different, not least because of the two different settings. The English arrangement is in a slightly damp dip in the landscape next to a lake. Surrounded by foliage of the abundant soft green variety, some of the stones have been overtaken by moss and in an old postcard I found of the site the effect is more of a colonial edifice being reclaimed by rain forest than of the dessicating preserving power of African sand. The rearrangement of the stones, like the rearrangement of letters in an anagram, reveals its own unconscious associations and possibilities.
17th - 20th May 2007
Private View Thursday 6-9pm by invitation only.
Opening Hours:
Friday 18th 11-9pm, Saturday 19th 11-7pm & Sunday 20th 11-7pm
Four is pleased to present Anna Barham at the Interior Design Fair + Art 2007 at the RDS, Ballsbridge.
I found a picture in a book of 9 Roman columns which look as though they were all that was left of a group of buildings, with the caption: In 1827 the ruins of Leptis Magna, Libya, were re-erected in the gardens of King George IV at Virginia Water. I was fascinated by this small image and the world that began to grow in my mind from its frame.
The book tells that 37 columns, 10 capitals, 25 pedestals, 10 pieces of cornice, 5 inscribed slabs and some fragments of sculpture were brought to England in 1818 from the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna. The city had been buried and preserved under the hourglass of Saharan sand since it was abandoned in the 5th century after the invasion of the Vandals. The stones were brought to England by the then consul-general in Tripoli, Colonel Warrington, supposedly as a diplomatic gift to the Prince Regent from the Bashaw of Tripoli. The three tallest columns that he had removed from the sand were too big for the ship and were left on the beach at Leptis where they apparently still lie. The pieces of stone that did travel to England spent the next eight years in the forecourt of the British Museum but were finally used to create a folly in the royal family’s private estate at Virginia Water by the royal architect Jeffrey Wyattville. Instead of arranging the stones in their original formation to faithfully recreate whatever building they had come from, or using them to create the ruins of a single imagined building, he arranged them to suggest a section of a city that could be wandered through.
I visited Virginia Water with no more knowledge of what it would look like than the picture in the book which was quite tightly framed and didn’t give much away. I had developed an image in my mind of what the surroundings would look like and had assumed that there would be a lot more of the ruins, that the photograph represented only a small section. In fact there isn’t much more, but the site is arranged very cleverly, making you imagine that there is a city beyond. You can’t walk through it anymore as the site has been enclosed by iron railings since the 1950s. Ruins invite you to fill in the gaps and imagine what they might have been, to project your own fantasy onto them. Even seeing the reality rather than a photo is still to see something incomplete – that has its own off-screen or out-of-frame. The railings add to this sense of beyond, creating another layer of separation from the past and turning them into ruined ruins.
It struck me that the dismantling and rearrangement of the stones was like an anagram. The two structures were equivalent in their being comprised of the same blocks, but the sense created by the two arrangements was different, not least because of the two different settings. The English arrangement is in a slightly damp dip in the landscape next to a lake. Surrounded by foliage of the abundant soft green variety, some of the stones have been overtaken by moss and in an old postcard I found of the site the effect is more of a colonial edifice being reclaimed by rain forest than of the dessicating preserving power of African sand. The rearrangement of the stones, like the rearrangement of letters in an anagram, reveals its own unconscious associations and possibilities.