Art Assassins and Eleanor Wright worked together to produce a collaboratively designed fabric inspired by the local built environment.
Entitled A Pattern Language, this new work has been developed as part of the Art Assassins’ year-long project The Peckham Experiment: A Centre for Self-Organisation exploring the history of the Peckham Experiment with the Pioneer Health Foundation, the Wellcome Collection’s Library, the Science Gallery at King’s College and community partners Peckham Vision and the Wilderness Wood, alongside a historian-in-residence, heritage experts and artists.
The Peckham Experiment (1926-1950) was primarily based within the purpose built Pioneer Health Centre on St Mary’s Road in Peckham and sought to change attitudes towards individual and collective wellbeing through the cultivation of health as opposed to the treatment of illness. Following the Experiment’s conclusion that the individual and their environment are inseparable, the Art Assassins and artist Eleanor Wright have been developing this new work during a series of workshops at the South London Gallery that draw on its shared locality with The Peckham Experiment.
Stemming from site visits to community run initiatives, introductions to alternative and philosophical building methods and place-making, and urban walks, the group have collectively created a design for printed fabric generated directly from the local built environment. Textiles has always been an essential means of communication for motifs, designs, cultural values and ideas. In this sense, the historical ‘durability’ of textiles is very similar to that of architecture, but instead of monumental remains physically linked to a particular place, there are mobile textile fragments. The newly designed fabric was used to make domestic textiles for the group and distributed amongst the Peckham community and project partners, further activating the holistic legacy of The Peckham Experiment.
BIOGRAPHIES
Art Assassins are a group of young beings aged between 14-21 years old who meet every Tuesday at the South London Gallery. To find out more about the Art Assassins click here.
Eleanor Wright is an artist based in Dusseldorf. A central topic in Eleanor Wright’s work is the exploration of architecture and the question as to what architecture can be; in relation to the body, and its role in the materialising of culture. As such, her work not only references architecture but also design, textiles and their wider relationships with society, community and spatial relations. These interrelated areas – embedded in similar economies of time – result in a practice that resists classification as model, furniture, sculpture, installation or textile pattern design. Instead, her work accentuates the dialogic potential of material, place and interaction.
Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
A Pattern Language by the Art Assassins and Eleanor Wright