Cloud Spaces

‘Cloud Space’ February 2008

Cloud Gallery Artists Collective

Exhibition in the Music Hall Gallery, Shrewsbury as part of the

‘Greenhouse Shropshire / Greenhouse Britain’ Exhibitions

Cloud Space Installation

Cloud Space was created for the Greenhouse Shropshire Exhibition by the Cloud Gallery artists’ collective.

The Cloud Space is a calm enclosure for everyone to enter and experience in their own way, surrounded by natural materials and away from the urban pace. The spiral walls are constructed with willow, while clay forms a central disc. Each of these materials has a particular relationship with water, the substance of clouds.

Images of the sky and passing clouds have been captured and drawn down into this artificial space. This view of the atmosphere, where the forces of global warming are gathering, is dislocated from our normal perspective. It is an invitation to reflect on our place on the earth.

Global warming is just one symptom of human consumption. In the relentless drive for wealth and success, many people lead a frenzied existence with narrowed-down vision and minds caught up in an almost virtual world of electronica.

In addition to the installation featured in thegallery, we created an Artists Walk of Shrewsbury, around and between the Exhibition venues to link with the Cloud Space. The walk includes a number of places where people are encouraged to “stand and stare”, and where you may find one of our Erratic boulder artworks which will be temporarily sited. These boulders echo those left as “erratics” following the retreat of glacial ice, such as the Bellstone.

This installation and the associated walk allow people a moment to refocus minds back to reality and regain awareness of the “here and now”. In these spaces, we can appreciate the passing of time and see the detail and distinctiveness of the place around us. It is a time to use all our senses, to experience being in our own bodies in this place, and consider that “being” is as important as “doing”.

Maps for the walk are available in The Music Hall and at other Exhibition venues.

The Cloud Gallery Artists’ Collective

We are a group of six artists based in Shropshire, who came together to address the shortage of facilities for visual art in the county. As a group of experienced artists we were excited by the realisation we could design and create our own working space. As our ideas developed and enthusiasm increased within the group and in the local community, we saw the project becoming a groundbreaking collaboration for us.

Collectively we hold a broad range of skills and experience including project development and management, environmental and engineering consultancy, business and financial management and experience of self build. We cover a wealth of artistic disciplines from ceramicists to film makers, set designers to photographers, sculptors to dancers as well as community and environmental arts.

Concern for the environment is the underlying principle which binds us and informs our artistic practices. We recognise that art in rural areas is often undervalued, but every community needs to express itself and to respond to events, its landscape, culture and history. At the Cloud Gallery we will offer a different cultural approach for the more dispersed rural community in a place that fits with its surroundings.

We all have a connection to the countryside in our own lives or recent ancestry and we want the Cloud Gallery to help put people back in touch with the landscape, to give back some of the feel for working with natural materials that can easily be lost in today’s society. We hope that this will encourage greater understanding and response to the environment and that this, in turn, will help create a virtuous circle through which social and physical environments enhance each other.

Whilst development of the Cloud Gallery itself will be the primary aim for us, we will also be creating art work and organising events to engage with people and establish the project’s identity. We want to accommodate a degree of experimentation and organic development, so that the process of building the gallery with the community is itself a creative event.

This collaborative way of working has already been put into practice at a hands-on eco building event that the Cloud Gallery organised in September 2007. At the event a group of over 35 delegates received training in sustainable building techniques and were able to create a small sculptural space over the course of a weekend.