08/02/2011 – 05/03/2011
Anne Rook was a special jury prize winner in the 2009 Sheffield Artist’s Book Prize. Anne’s exhibition, at Bank Street Arts in February 2011, showed work around the theme of Spontaneous Cities, illustrating something of the breadth of her practice beyond the artist’s book.
The central element of the exhibition, ‘Spontaneous Cities’ is a randomly self-renewing computer animation in which shanty towns are built and re-built endlessly. The animation reflects the way social, geographical and economic conditions dictate the form and shape of habitats in many parts of the world.
To parallel the ad-hoc building of shanty huts, Anne has made small sculptures of huts from material found in skips or building sites. Inkjet prints of some to these huts are painstakingly and repetitively drawn upon to suggest the tedium of the patching-up and making-do of these dwellings.
‘And Where Do They All Come From?’ is a walk in structure made of children’s shoes, cut in half and showing the imprint of ‘lost’ wearers. It is suggestive of the harsh condition of children’s lives in these shanty towns. These often spring up after man-made or natural disasters, poised unhappily on destroyed sites and scattered with the remains of human habitats or clothing.
A larger version of ‘And Where Do They All Come From?’ was commissioned in 2000 for ‘riverside’ as part of East International, Norwich [Norwich Gallery and Norwich School of Art and Design – Funded by A4E National Lottery through the Arts Council of England]
