Three Follies for Print Hall
Artist(s): Juliet Haysom
Client: Alaska Developments
Three Follies for Print Hall was commissioned by Ginkgo Projects on behalf of Alaska Developments for the Print Hall development near Old Market, Bristol. The work takes the form of three follies, reintroducing fragments of lost and re-imagined local buildings into the site. In this work Juliet Haysom addresses ideas of erasure, reconnection, rebuilding and removal – themes which have defined this site for the last century.
SITE HISTORY
In the last 100 years parts of David Street have been opened, closed, reopened and pedestrianised; Jacob Street has been cut off from Temple Way; Hawkins Street was built; and the fortunes of Old Market have declined. Much of the local area was destroyed in the Second World War and optimistic post-war planning, in particular the construction of the Old Market Flyover road scheme in the late 1960s, problematically reshaped local pedestrian and vehicular routes. The contemporary re-landscaping of the site is intended to contribute to the regeneration of the local area and to prioritise pedestrian use.
The FOLLIES
The three follies are installed in a walkway that reconnects Jacob Street with Temple Way. They were cast from silicone moulds taken directly from a condemned wall that once enclosed the Print Hall and Hawkins Street developments’ temporary car park, which includes richly weathered surfaces in two local materials: red brick and pennant stone, and featured traces of elements such as doorways, windows and buttresses. They record the original walls with all of their imperfections and transform them into unfamiliar, monumental fragments. The follies address the implications of the radical changes brought about by erasure, reconnection, rebuilding, and removal - of memory and forgetting - in material terms. From the intimacy of the eye-level detail to the scale of the site within its wider context, they intend to sensitively define its specific sense of place.
The next phase of this project was the creation of a further two follies and the landscaping and of a public park on Hawkins Street.
