SHEFFIELD, UK.- Currently being re-modelled as “an urban village for the 21st Century”. Sheffield City Council’s Devonshire Quarter Action Plan proposes measures for the enhancement of existing open spaces, suggesting that temporary installations by artists could be used to try out ideas, but no artists have been appointed yet.  

S1 / projects invited artists to submit proposals for sites untouched by the current phase of property development. S1 / projects has commissioned five artists to develop their proposals as part of a temporary public art campaign. 

Tom Bloor (Birmingham) produces geometric patterned wallpaper in A4 sections on a photocopier. Bloor will paper part of a subway tunnel at the gateway to the Devonshire Quarter with one of his monochrome designs. The area already is used for fly-posting and it is anticipated that during the four weeks the wallpaper will become a decorative backdrop for the material posted over it. 

Steve Dutton & Steve Swindells (Sheffield) recently published a text-based work in The Sheffield Telegraph as part of an on-going response to the re-development of the city. The piece imagines a walk across a plaza, proposing an open social space invested with history and a sense of possibility. For this project Dutton and Swindells will re-edit the text and set it to familiar musical tunes to form The Green Text, a response to the recent gentrification of the Devonshire Green area. The artists have commissioned a Soprano to perform the text as a series of operatic arias as a form of protest at the launch. 

Matthew Houlding (Todmorden) is interested in aspirational architecture; the modular buildings and complexes that make up the landscape of the leisure industry. His table-top models constructed from consumer packaging have gained him recognition in EASTinternational and more recently on the Comme Ça Prize shortlist. For the Devonshire Quarter he will re-produce a postcard image of a densely populated 1960’s holiday resort as a fly-poster billboard. The postcard will be enlarged in A3 sections on a colour photocopier so that the image becomes distorted by the pixilation to resemble a pointillist or impressionist painting. 

Clare Iles (Essex) creates assemblages from discarded material or objects found around the industrial estates or residential areas where she sites her work. Iles documents her sculptures as photographs before taking them apart or leaving them to de-compose and gradually re-enter the system of objects that move around the local area. Iles will create new works for the Devonshire Quarter that will be documented in a series of posters displayed on the exterior of the Stokes Tiles warehouse. 

Joanne Jones (Birmingham) is interested in perceptions of natural beauty in landscape and the realities of informal wilderness. Working in a green, recreational area behind the West One apartment development Jones will create a thick foliage from audio and video tape for one of the deciduous trees. The tape will be recycled from old cassettes, appropriating a familiar item of urban detritus to replicate natural forms.