Growing House - Scaffolding
The Growing House Group is an art collective led by Kate Egan and Assadour Markarov, in collaboration with the China Academy of Art and the Manchester School of Art. This group brings together young artists and students from China (Hangzhou) and the UK (Manchester), fostering mutually enriching relationships through online workshops, talks, and exchanges of ideas and concepts. As Kate Egan once said, "Art is our shared language." Members infuse their own ideas into the space they create, re-imagining and transforming "happenings" into both virtual and physical spaces, co-creating artwork across borders.
Artistic Team
The artwork begins with the re-imagining and re-interpretation of Alan Kaprow’s "happenings," re-envisioned through transient works that will unfold over a two-week period during the Triennial, across external, internal, and online locations. The project connects various times and spaces, engaging with the exhibition environment, the scenes, and the audience, while encouraging participants to connect with the concept of "New Happenings" through metaphorical stitching and connecting the artworks. The artists envision the entire space as a state of "growing" and "scaffolding," utilizing the power of "thinking through making" in response to the exhibition’s theme of Being Theoria.
Concept manuscript
The audience is invited to enter the space to observe, participate, move, touch, and interact, completing the work through open collaboration. Audience participation is central to the artwork, tracing back to the concept of New Happenings introduced at the inception of the creation process, serving as both the starting and concluding point. Through the random combination of flexible materials such as fabrics and threads, the artists use techniques like weaving, knitting, knotting, and collage to help the audience experience the space they have created. More importantly, the Growing House dissolves boundaries, allowing the audience to experience the dual pleasures of art and life.
Exhibition View
Description of the artwork
There is a space, which begins to grow and change constantly; create a sound, flash a light, open your eyes (window), build a corridor/tunnel, and then connect with other spaces. It becomes a house, but it does not stop, it is still growing, it is happening.
About a growing house
The “House” is not only a place for the body to live, but also a psychological hint of safety and shelter.“Growing house” is a poetic response or antidote to the complexity of living life now, the exhausting fast pace of society driven by speed. Dr Stephanie Brown suggests that ‘the mass of incoming information has eroded our attention and our creativity. People have less time to reflect on anything as they become dominated by a need to act, a need to be online, robotically always checking. Multi-tasking stimulates internal chaos and fragmented attention.’ “Growing House” is a labyrinth of ‘moments’ in flux – these moments are shored up by four media: scaffolding, boxes, threads and fabric, allowing the house to be altered - a state change, in play, in chaos in contemplation and in perspective. Gaston Bachelard(1) once said, “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,’ perhaps to shield us from the storm, or to remind people of the joy of life and where we are living and existing in a complex and changeable scaffolding environment.
(1) Gaston Bachelard , “The Poetics of Space”，Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter, he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break.
Exhibition View
