MILTON KEYNES.- IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2023 and centre:mk present The Place Between, an epic immersive artwork exploring the secret lives of plants and flowers by artist Rebecca Louise Law and sound artist Jason Singh at Middleton Hall, centre:mk from 14 to 30 July.

IF: Milton Keynes International Festival has built a reputation for animating the public spaces of one of the UK’s most future-facing cities. Milton Keynes, which came to life in 1967, is a city which was always planned to be ‘better by design’. Since 2010, the biennial International Festival has collaborated with Grade II listed shopping mall centre:mk, celebrated for its iconic architectural design, to programme immersive artworks into its vibrant modernist spaces.

For 2023, the Festival and the centre have commissioned The Place Between, a breathtakingly beautiful large-scale installation created by artist Rebecca Louise Law and sound artist Jason Singh.

Rebecca Louise Law has an international reputation for creating large-scale immersive installations from natural materials. Preserved flowers have become the signature of her most recognised works. The flowers are gathered, individually sewn and suspended in their thousands and viewers are invited to navigate through them, discovering the diverse forms, colours and textures of each specimen. These colossal works are intentionally equivocal and while themes of symbolism, consumerism, sustainability and life cycles often present themselves, the artworks also provide a harmonious sense of place for rest and contemplation takes precedence. For The Place Between, Law is working with Milton Keynes residents inviting them to forage, grow and donate 20,000 items of plant material, such as flowers, shells, seeds, cones and grasses. These will be added to her personal collection of 200,000 items and used in the installation. Each item will be sewn and wired into 8-metre strands by Law and a team of locally-based artists and volunteers, making connections with each other as they work together with the plant material. Together they will sew and wire the stems and fronds into multiple trails of flowers and plant material to create an epic hanging garden and centre:mk’s Middleton Hall will be transformed into an unexpectedly contemplative space for visitors that is simultaneously protective, potent and fragile.

The Place Between features binaural soundscapes generated entirely by trees and plants from sound artist, producer and DJ Jason Singh who captures the biodata from plants and transforms it into sound. He records indoor and outdoor plants, uses bio feedback technology to capture the electrical activity made deep within their vegetative tissues, and converts this data into soundtracks played through headphones that will envelop people as they make their journey through the epic hanging garden.

Special commission by centre:mk in collaboration with IF: Milton Keynes International Festival
The Place Between
July 14th, 2023 - July 30th, 2023