The Village Green

The Village Green project took the form of a Sculpture Park on the Millennium Green in Stanton St John for the weekend. This project aimed to bring contemporary art to the heart of rural Oxfordshire. By merging 3 artists from Oxford and 5 from London, we wanted to provide the artists with an audience they wouldn’t normally get and the audience with a relatively new way of interpreting art in a rural habitat. The work ranged from sight specific installations, to interactive sculptures and work that comment on the environment in which they are displayed.  

Julian Wild’s communal sculpture, ‘Making the Connection’, recently shown at the Jerwood Sculpture Park, explores functionality whilst playing with the relationship between artist and audience. Alan Franklin’s new work ‘Tennis Court’ has been simply born out of the topography of the green whilst sharing Wild’s interest in the viewer’s participation.  

Matt Clark, Matt Ager and Zoe Paul were all working within the historical context individual to their practice but very aware of a world history that has come before. Paul’s sculptures lampoon a classical school of thought with contemporary geometric abstraction whilst Ager’s faux narratives juxtapose a history lesson of the everyday
with a subtle presentation of the Carnivalesque. In presenting a work taken from a 16th century William Hodges painting the landscape is transported through space and time to an era of geographical discovery. At the Village Green Clark’s departure from his normally invented histories is warranted by a local history possibly more absurd than his own. Having grown up in the village and with one of the founders of the colony of Massachusetts having been born within a stones throw of the green, Clark
reclaims the area with a reinterpretation of the state flag.  

Craig Barnes uses the more modern history of an iconic symbol of industrial Britain to heighten the environment in which its displayed, in an attempt to illustrate both the
artifice & idiocy, as well as the glory & magnificence, of modern life. Jan Crombie’s ‘Tower Tribe’ works in appearance are almost polar opposites of Barnes’ signifier.
Assuming the guise of ‘markers’ for a misplaced congregation, both work hard to pin down what community means. Working in the village but outside the village green Emma Titcombe’s subtly placed occurrences encompass unobserved participation with an environmental awareness quite apt for the transitional circumstances of the village festival as a whole.