PROJECT78
 

British sculptor Peter Fillingham has developed an immersive practice that includes site specific object-based installation often working in the peripheries of our cultural epicentres and within regenerative contexts.

 

His installation “Love France” will enable him to propose the importance of “thinking about making sculpture” within the context and infinite potential offered by a project space.

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The context of the project space has created an opportunity for Peter Fillingham to restore, repaint and in some ways re-live elements from previous works, events, and exhibitions.  LOVE FRANCE might thus be seen as an installation that re-defines previous works and ideas, and projects them once again. At the same time, each work can of course be encountered as an individual entity, free of any references and strings.

 

These elements are placed side by side with a new work, a triptych that has emerged from this collaboration with Project 78 Gallery: “Here. Daisies. Peter.” The first element of the triptych is a found object from the flea market in Saint Ouen, a close suburb of Paris, where Fillingham lived for almost ten years, a large empty Ricard bottle. Referencing the ritual of the aperitif, the large Ricard bottle is neither lying down, nor standing up. It is somewhere in the middle. This could be seen as a playful reference to absolute uncertainty, a recurrent theme in Fillingham’s work. ‘Daisies’, is an appropriation of a work by Patrick Adam Jones, inexpensively printed locally, that conjures the importance of the basic elements of education - words, numbers, letters, and colours. ‘Peter’ is once again an inexpensively produced photographic panel featuring George Frampton’s sculpture of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, representing the importance of storytelling, dreaming and the experience of growing up.

 

Within this triptych there are two things that make sense to me: a recognition of the significance of past experiences and histories, and a dynamic and radical appreciation of the present, suggesting what is ahead of me’. (Peter Fillingham)

 

‘Peter’ is also the beginning of a new line of enquiry for Fillingham that considers the possibility of how important cultural works, practices and ideas can be toured from village to village across every corner of Britain.

The writer Jane Lee in her collaborative text Fillingham-Daf-Duhamel-Lee, describes the work of George Duhamel “la possession du monde” ( the possession of the world) and how he argues passionately for an honest devotion to the individual things. “We must,” wrote Duhamel, “first possess them for themselves and transform nothing beyond our strictest needs at the risk of losing forever their intelligence and their real possession.” He continues. “The subjective value of each object must be restored, and saved from the diminishing process of obsessive manipulation, or we risk the loss of our own subjectivity.”

 

Taken from the second U, the newsletter of Salle de Bain

Jane lee

1999

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LIST OF WORKS

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Black 2020

White 2020

16 colour screen prints, edition of 20 each.

These works were made originally as two collages cut out from oil-painted paper during the lockdown of 2020. The forms are from tracings of images of empty gallery and museum spaces.

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ENSA 2022

A homage to ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, an organisation established in 1939 by Basil Dean and Leslie Henson to provide entertainment for British armed forces personnel during World War II. This work includes one of Basil Dean’s jackets, lined with elements of military unforms, decorated with ribbons placed in horizontally lines like medals. ‘Every Night Something Awful’ was the nickname for ENSA. Military themes and references appear often in Fillingham’s work. This is one of a series of suits made by Fillingham which first began in 2016 in the exhibition To Joseph Beuys, Galleria Cadaqués in Catalonia.

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HERE. DAISIES. PETER. (2022)

Tryptych comprising found object, steel, two photographic display panels.

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ELVS 1997

ELVS is made up of two light boxes, each being silently activated by sound-to-light signals from analogue lighting control boxes, connected to a Sony Walkman playing a disco playlist. This work was originally shown at Kaus Australis, Rotterdam in 1997. The non-word ‘elvs’ was taken from a small observational drawing of the side of a French freight train. This work was made at a time of collective awareness of the impact of HIV and AIDS.

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Twinkle 2018

Wooden blocks, coloured fabrics, aluminium.

Twinkle was conceived as a development from ELVS, a protective, hand-made enclosure, first made for an exhibition entitled ‘Rasheed Areen, Peter Fillingham and The Chelsea Space’ in 2018.