Anne Tallentire in conversation with Mary Cremin

measurement plan is the first project curated by Helen Nisbet in her role as CEO & Artistic Director of Cromwell Place. The temporary installation by Anne Tallentire will unfold and evolve through the week culminating in a durational performance on 14 October.

The project consists of a floor installation, tape drawing, assembled sculpture and wall-based work.  
 
Perfectly replicating the floor plan of the 1970s housing estate where she lives, Tallentire responds to the physical space of the Lavery studio, using its dimensions to contain a 1:1 scale representation of her home. Using tape as a drawing material, attached to the ubiquitous construction protection material Correx, Tallentire not only considers her living conditions, but also introduces wider questions around housing provision and what is deemed acceptable. 
 
Tallentire’s tape drawings speak to the mechanisms of ordinary life, they invite us into clearly determined physical spaces to imagine what they might feel like for others. Alongside a consideration of the everyday, the work acknowledges the universal, political structures that dictate how we and other people live and can be constrained.  
 
Speaking to processes of thinking and construction this floor drawing will be materially worked and unworked to produce several iterations, culminating in the production of stacked assemblages. A number of speculative plan wall-works installed in the space using graphic plastic tape will present a more improvised style of mark-making typical of Tallentire’s employment of found objects, in this case a fragment of a wooden pallet.  
 
Like a poet, Tallentire carefully holds and determines what is used and what is taken away. measurement plan will unfold collaboratively and performatively, responding to the flux and precarity of social and political life. The project is manifest by Tallentire working in collaboration with her technicians, performers and the audience who will come and go during the week.  Over time their footprints, left on the floor, will add imprints critical to the work’s evolution, before the final dismantling.  

On Saturday, 14 October between 2.00 - 5.00pm, Anne Tallentire assisted by George Bularca and Luca Hughes will perform a process of disassembly and reassembly that will culminate in an altered iteration of the work, on view until 4.00pm on Sunday, 15 October.


Image credit: (detail) Anne Tallentire, Look Over 3: LIVE, South London Gallery, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Anne Tetzlaff.