Gwilym Sainsbury (summer studio assistant and Leeds Uni student) and I have been working on the new commission for the gallery Fermyn Woods Contemporary Art near Peterborough. It is a maquette for a new pavilion/ abstract sculpture for the remote-control boating and duck pond in Corby. Corby faces a lot of regeneration, an even newer town in a 1950's new town as the Government builds thousands of houses and a commuter train line to London. There is though still a lot of the original 50's town in Corby that wasn't as ideal as the designers had hoped, perhaps the closure of the steel making industry saw to that. Looking about one day a few months ago we became interested in the current boating lake pavilion, set in a nature park, it looks to have always been one of the poorer additions to the townscape, more a flat roofed wooden cabin.

Obviously Gywilymn and I as artists/ self proclaimed celebrity architects are just the right people to have a lasting impact on the regeneration of Corby, so we have set about with cardboard, a glue gun and balsa wood designing a new  contemporary architecture style pavilion all be it at a scale only suitable for remote control boats. Hopefully we will create a mini lakeside proposal that will in a small way counter and comment on the current contemporary-esque architecture being built, whilst being inspired by new town sculpture such as Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee.
 
Our sculpture also sets out to question if art can only ever be a kind of play architecture, a thing that could later inspire something that is genuinely useful, or a place to experiment for something that may one day become a real proposed building. Art seems to be stuck in this place, every time it steps out of it's passive role one finds someone else is doing it better as a profession or specialism. And so art remains the domain of the generalist, the in-between, whilst also providing the fodder for the magazine, art celebrity, an exclusive luxuries market and a stage for posing at the art gallery or art prizes.