Danish artist Anja Margarethe Bache’s site-specific installation for the Project Space is a response to the urban location of Marsden Woo Gallery in Clerkenwell, London.

She began by researching different aspects of the site from her studio in Denmark, employing Google Earth and other sources of evidence to make sketches that recorded the spatial sequences of its surrounding urban features, historical layers, population mass and so forth. She then developed this information using concepts derived from urban planning, such as spread, condensation and juxtaposition, until the original features of the drawings lost their direct referential function to become a series of signs.

She will be using these signs to structure the arrangement of her extraordinary glazed concrete and wooden artefacts in the gallery space, in order to comment on the architectural framework in which they are sited. Concrete is a material more associated with building than with ceramic art and within this installation it bridges the two areas, combining ideas of structural and poetic form, strength and sensuality.

A further feature of the installation is an adapted drawing, a remnant of her working process, to be painted onto the floor and up the wall, to exist as part sign, part ornamentation. Her intention is to provoke a variety of questions: Does the installation refer to the situation inside or outside the gallery, or to a set of circumstances yet to be completed? Is it a reference to a virtual world, or to some other kind of experience?

Conceived 600 miles away from the actual gallery space in London and informed only by virtual experiences of its geographical and architectural features, through this project Anja Margarethe Bache investigates the ambiguous relationship between representation and presentation.

Anja Margarethe Bache (b. 1964) is a Danish artist based in Kongens Lyngby, north of Copenhagen. Following undergraduate studies in art and design in Denmark, France and Chile, she gained an MSc in Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (1994), an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1996) and a PhD in Architecture from the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark (2002). She is an associate professor in the Departments of Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Denmark and Sweden. This will be the first exhibition of her work in the UK.

Text © Tessa Peters, courtesy of Marsden Woo Gallery.