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Profile:
Steve Messam is an environmental artist
based in the North of England. With his site-specific
installations, he sets visual accents in rural or urban
settings, which include historical relics and vacant
architecture that make us perceive the familiar
environment in a new way. He is also interested in space:
the interaction of art and audience within confined and
open spaces, the role of aesthetics and the physical
experience.
His works include Beached
(2007), in which he filled a beach with thousands
of sandcastles and paper flags; Landscape Bubble (2006), a redundant
building in the North Pennines encapsulated within a
transparent globe, Drop
(2008) - a giant reflective raindrop the
size of a three-storey building in the Lake District and Clad (2009) - a
traditional timber-framed cottage wrapped in the fleece of
300 local sheep in Newtown, Wales for Oriel Davies. He
created the first off-site installation at the 2006
Shanghai Biennial and created a number of site specific
installations across the Venetian Lagoon during the 2009
Venice Biennale.
In 2002 he established ‘Fold’
- an arts organisation which aimed to provide and promote
access to quality contemporary art in the rural
environment. From its small gallery space in the sheep
market town of Kirkby Stephen, Fold showed the work of
hundreds of artists, both in the gallery space and in the
wider landscape. In 2004 he created FRED - an
annual art invasion across Cumbria - one of Europe’s
largest annual festivals of site specific work. Between
2004 and 2008 over 300 artists produced new work in over
350 locations outside the gallery environment and was seen
by hundreds of thousands of visitors.
As an artist Steve Messam has worked primarily outside the
gallery environment for the past 18 years. He has a
particular interest in the cultural reference points
inherent in the work of artists living in rural
communities and exploiting the assets of landscape,
agriculture and community for challenging the
preconceptions of contemporary rural arts practice.
