Life's a bench (Monday, 26 March 2007)
compiled by Cristina Martín de Vidales
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Sandra Johnston: Waterfront Hall, site 5; from Belfast bench stops: an alternative tour of Belfast; image held here
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The Arts Council of Northern Ireland recently commissioned Sandra Johnston to develop a website as part of the BBC 2 arts series Simom Schama's Power of Art. On the BBC website you can find a series of art commissions, each located in a UK city and created by a local artist. Among others, you can see Bristol by Yara El-Sherbini and Leeds by Lone Twin.
The alternative sightseeing tour created by Johnston uses a series of her pictures and observations of the city to present a public space studied from different benches located across the city. Johnston is an artist based in Belfast who has dealt on several occasions with notions of territory, focusing her work on human relationships to space, and how we place a value on places and personal geography.
Belfast bench stops: an alternative tour of Belfast examines the process of stopping at different benches located in every kind of public space, such as Belfast City Airport, City Hall, the Botanic garden... Johnston explains:
The experience of walking across sections of the city on a daily basis and stopping to sit for long periods of time on public benches, was a fascinating process, significantly slowing down the action of moving through Belfast without the usual agendas of shopping, working or socializing. I came to appreciate that the outdoor civic benches function as reminders and demarcations of the shifting parameters of public space.
You can find this alternative perspective of Belfast and other UK cities by checking the Power of Art's site; you can access the tour more directly here.
