For the next four weeks a calm and beautiful digital artwork can be seen from dusk until the early hours in central Lerwick, cladding an eight metre wall on the Fish Bowl shop opposite Architect Richard Gibson’s office near the Market Cross.
Bedtime Stories is a digital textile architectural covering, created for the site by Finnish textile artist Outi Martikainen and commissioned by Shetland Arts for the Portage project. The work is a continuation of Portage: Textiles, Extremes of Scale, the recent exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery, the third in the Portage series, bringing new forms of craft exhibition to Shetland.
Photos will follow shortly...
Outi Martikainen is based in Helsinki and much of her work involves a conversation between textiles and architecture, some of her textile-based work permanently clads multi-storey buildings in the centre of Helsinki.
Bedtime Stories uses the interwoven forms within scaffolding as a starting point and mathematical symbols to represent conversations that build up into towers of stories. Outi describes these towers as imaginary scaffoldings, linking or weaving together during dream-filled sleep, to create new stories themselves. The dreamlike qualities are reflected in the ephemeral qualities of the projected light.
Bedtime Stories is the largest scale Portage exhibit, it was sent to Shetland as an email attachment and is being shown every night for four weeks, creating an extreme scale artwork that reflects the concept of scale, explored throughout the main exhibition which ran from early October to 14th November 2010.
Richard Gibson said; “we are pleased to be co-operating with Shetland Arts and we think it looks really good - impressive – it shows there are many possibilities.”
Hazel Hughson of Shetland Arts said, “Outi considered the time of year and the town environment in creating this image. Bringing and exhibiting this large work from Finland in this way is an appropriate conclusion of the successful Portage exhibition series, which has brought to Shetland the experience of interactive jewellery, rings and finger ornaments by international makers, and some challenging contemporary textiles. Relevant to the theme of conversations, we were supported in the projection process by many people working in the town centre; the scaffolders, architects, business owners, Bank staff, SIC Officers, The Tall Ships organisers and the Lerwick Port Authority."
