KINGS GATE, AMESBURY

Client: Bloor Homes

Artists: Holly Corfield Carr. Juliet Haysom

Kings Gate, Amesbury

Ginkgo has produced and is implementing a wide-reaching art strategy for Kings Gate in Amesbury, Wiltshire, for client Bloor Homes.

The art strategy aims to enhance the sense of community and cohesion between ‘existing’ Amesbury and the new Kings Gate development; drawing the two communities together through engagement and participation.

Bloor Homes propose a wide ranging and inclusive approach, opening up the activity of the commissioning programme beyond the development site. This allows for an exciting range of permanent and temporary programming, focusing activity on Amesbury but allowing for work within the World Heritage Site and tying into activity being developed by partners such as Wiltshire Council, English Heritage and The National Trust.

It is in the nature of a World Heritage Site that a great deal of archaeological research has been undertaken and this is true of Amesbury itself which was recently declared the oldest site of continuous settlement in the UK. In order to tread fresh ground the art strategy is working in the spaces between the well known landmarks and research activity, looking at the landscape in a wider sense and as a place in which all partners co-exist and have common interests and goals. The commissions will look for the human voice within the landscape.

Holly Corfield Carr worked in Amesbury on an initial scoping phase. This has led to the development a range of creative activity reading the landscape and creating new work in response to ideas of relocation and the meaning of memories and home. More about Holly’s project can be found here.

Work is now progressing towards the creation of a new artist-designed garden by Juliet Haysom.