Boat Display at Stonebridge Lock - 15/04/11

Over the last 8 weeks Nathan Birchenough, Nicholas Brown, Craig Kao & Savvas Papasavva have worked towards building a modular canal boat, testing strange contraptions by Stonebridge Lock and taking the advice of passers-by. They became interested in making a boat partly because of the lack of draconian legalities in place to prevent them; that is to say the canal was a freer space to operate, however while going back and forth from their test location they discovered the forced application of the things they were trying to avoid: http://www.londonboaters.org/leecampaign - It seems the four artists are not the first to see these relics of Britain industrial past as an alternative space and while they have been met with curiosity and friendliness by the canal inhabitants and users, they naturally feel sympathetic to the boat peoples' struggle and wish to highlight this.

Some of the boaters see this sudden action on the part of British Waterways as an attempt to 'cleanse' the waterways in time for the Olympics. While massive swathes of arts funding has been diverted towards the event, which Patricia Bickers described in Arts Monthly as a "funding black hole", it is adversely affecting the varied community living on the canal, much as the initial land grab adversely affected the communities and artist -- inhabited buildings that used to exist in this area of London.

The group's initial decision to build a boat in standardised units was meant to allow flexibility and variety of use, but through the many building attempts, the range of advice they have received (from cyclists, narrowboaters and a man with a friend in the Navy) and the irregular time patterns in which the four artists have used the workspace, each unit is entirely unique and incompatible with any other. Not as aesthetic as some of the more colourful canal boats with surround them, theirs are marked with an eccentricity, tenacity and willingness to take off their badges as artists and become for a time boat builders with the help of passers by.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonebridge_Lock
http://www.thistudios.com/
http://www.londonboaters.org/leecampaign
http://www.facebook.com/bbkps

(Thanks to Birgitte for filming.)

Category:

Comedy

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