Public art
Art is playing a key role in the establishment of the new Trumpington Meadows community by connecting with the values and identity of its people. It will also help to integrate the new built environment with the existing urban form and the natural surroundings.
InSite Arts - creativity at the heart of the community
InSite Arts act as art consultants and project managers for Trumpington Meadows. Their brief is to work in partnership with TMLC and the local community to deliver innovative and relevant public art and arts initiatives in a diversity of scales and a wide variety of media. Through the commissioning of temporary and permanent artworks for Trumpington Meadows, they aim to find ways to create a sense of ownership for the existing and new communities.
For more information about Insite Arts please visit www.insitearts.com
Trace
In her role as Artist-in-Residence, Caroline Wright has spent time exploring the history of the Trumpington Meadows site, meeting local people, as well as those leading on the creation of this new and significant part of Trumpington and Haslingfield, unearthing intriguing insights into the past and potential future.
As well as orchestrating a programme of events and ‘happenings’ in the first year of development of the site, Caroline has also created a permanent work which can be viewed by generations of Trumpington Meadows residents and visitors.
TRACE was developed in response to Caroline's findings and research into the area (its past and its future), delineating details and architectural history which inspired her. Creating a link with the Plant Breeding Institute which once stood on the site (an institution still very much in people’s living memory), 80 golden bricks incorporated into the architecture mark crossing points between the new houses and former buildings.
TRACE pinpoints where the old and the new come together, marking the intersections between the rich history of the land and its use as a site for scientific development and its new role as the place for families to invest in and make their home. In its materiality, each brick, gilded in 24-carat gold leaf, acknowledges the archaeological finds made on the site, including a brooch of gold and garnet from the Saxon period.
The gilded individual bricks are set discretely, yet act as jewel-like moments within the domestic architecture of Trumpington Meadows. They may seem casually peppered among random houses so neatly ordered in the new development. However, they form a lasting legacy, gently referencing the footprint of the PBI buildings which housed scientists and staff working to change our food market beyond recognition. Following the mapping of TRACE around Trumpington Meadows provides a ghost-like outline of the site’s history and past relevance, providing a contemporary moment to remember.
A limited edition publication, also titled TRACE, accompanies the golden bricks, and each house with a golden brick will receive their own numbered copy. Other copies will be publicly available through local libraries and schools.The gold-leaf bricks and publications will remain in the houses forever and each generation of residents will find and experience the work anew.
Art in the Country Park
Katherine Clarke of muf architecture/art has been appointed the artist for the Trumpington Meadows Country Park. She has been working closely with the landscape architects Terence O'Rourke on the overall design of the park and a series of interventions.
Katherine was very excited by the archaeological find of the bed burial on the site and is currently planning an avenue of willow trees along the embankment, which will hide a stone or tiled carpet depicting the bed burial, perhaps featuring designs based on the crops grown at the PBI or the archaeology found on the site.
Play Patterns is an initiative to locate a series of art works which lead people from the Trumpington Meadows residential streets into the Country Park. Find out more here.
Art at the Primary School and Community Centre
United Visual Artists (UVA) are working with the new Trumpington Meadows primary school to develop a permanent work for the school to be built on the site.
Caroline Wright
Artist-in-Residence
Caroline Wright was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Trumpington Meadows in 2011.
Her practice encompasses visual and performance work in media as diverse as glass and gold. She has made work for cities and rural spaces, community spaces, galleries, theatres, churches, on desolate uninhabited islands and for audiences of 100 and of one. Through a conceptual archaeology, she aims to uncover and take control of the past, by resurrecting, enacting or undoing and in so doing, Wright explores the relationships we each have within the world and with each other, looking at our communication structures and our histories and narratives. She questions the effect of outside influences and experiences on our actions and behaviour frequently transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, often using a contextual or physical change to achieve new perspectives.
Based at Wysing Arts Centre near Cambridge, Caroline is an Arts Council England Escalator visual and live art selected artist. A recipient of an Artsadmin bursary in 2003, she is a member of the collectives Live Art Collective East (LACE) and the Escalator collective ROAM.
You can see more of Caroline's work at
www.carolinewright.com
muf architecture/art
Since 1994 muf architecture/art has established a reputation for pioneering and innovative projects that address the social, spatial and economic infrastructures of the public realm. muf are specialists in public realm architecture and art. The practice philosophy is driven by an ambition to realize the potential pleasures that exist at the intersection between the lived and the built. The creative process is underpinned by a capacity to establish effective client relationships that reveal and value the desires and experience of varied constituencies.
Find out more about muf
here.
United Visual Artists (UVA)
UVA is a London-based art practice that combines a wide range of disciplines including sculpture, installation, live performance, and architecture. The studio has an open approach to collaboration, uniting diverse skills to continuously evolve new technologies and materials, which in turn suggest new artistic directions.
Find out more about UVA
here.