The Laundry Room at BalinHouseProjects

An exhibition by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott

BalinHouseProjects is an artist-run non-profit space in SE1. BHP started in 2006 to provide space for dialogues and a platform for artists to make connections with other artist-run spaces and organisations. Located in a council flat in Borough, it has been offering the local residents of Tabard North Gardens estates opportunities to engage culturally in their own environment without feeling intimidated by the larger cultural establishments. The results of those very eclectic social gatherings have brought forward new ideas to engage further with the local community.

BHP is now coming to a close of a cycle, with the intervention in its space at the former laundry room of the Balin building by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott. It will be the first time that the artist and the designer, who have been familiar with each other’s works for 20 years, to collaborate in a project.

In the late 1960's Richard Wentworth lived off the New Kent Road where he witnessed the demolitions which led to the construction of the Heygate Estates in the early 1970's. It was during this period that as a 'foreigner' in the SE17 and SE16, Wentworth made the early photographs which later became known as 'Making Do and Getting By' and 'Occasional Geometrics'.*

Michael Marriott’s diverse practice is informed by a deep passion for the elemental nature of the project at hand and the stringent and honest handling of all materials involved. He spends ‘a lot of time observing and studying things and the world, analysing objects consciously and unconsciously in terms of material, function, use, misuse, form, colour, texture, finish, fixings, age, patina, junctions of line and material’.

The room, originally constructed as a laundry room that had changed its function as a storage room, has been a neglected corner of the building in the last decades. Here The Laundry Room will be a space to exchange, provoke or evoke thoughts, to rediscover old habits, to discuss the fast changing of technology and the lost function of some devices that are still vivid in our memory by sound and sight. The space will also let us reflect on the sudden effect of gentrification in its neighbourhood and the consequences of the economical values imposed by it.

This project includes the making of a book, a walk and talk, in collaboration with organisations such as College of Arts, The Cuming Museum in Southwark, South London Gallery and the local T&RA.

The Laundry Room is a project by Eduardo Padilha and Maiko Tsutsumi

Exhibition dates: 29 September to 28 October 2012 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 14:00 Admission by appointment only. Please contact [email protected] *Richard Wentworth will be part of the upcoming Serpentine Gallery’s Memory Marathon. (www.serpentinegallery.org/2012/10/memory_marathon.html)

Address: BalinHouseProjects Flat 22, Balin House Long Lane London SE1 1YQ

*Richard Wentworth will be part of the upcoming Serpentine memory marathon. For further information contact Eduardo Padilha: [email protected] M. 07813 949080 balinhouseprojects.wordpress.com

BHP