Traces of Living and A MUSE UM

For the last nine weeks our studio at 235 St John Street has been enveloped by Traces of Living / A MUSE UM, the 2nd iteration of our Making Space series. This enlivening and animating visual environment has stimulated debate and reflection amongst our architectural staff, and has been a joy to experience.    

Curated by Jonathan Watkins, this wonderful installation by the artist partnership Langlands and Bell (Ben and Nikki) Traces of Living / A MUSE UM includes Langlands and Bell signature neons, an animated film, a physical sculpture, vibrantly coloured graphical works and a 25 metre branded frontage to the studio on our full height glass façade declaring 'A MUSEUM' in decal 2 metre high coloured letters of blue, red, purple, yellow, pink and green. It is a rainbow of colour bringing a smile to our quiet neighbourhood of Clerkenwell.  

The show features works from early in the artists' oeuvre, with Traces of Living dating from 1986, alongside more recent work in A MUSE UM and BOZAR: MUSAC from 2007 and 2008 which explores the complexities of text and motif.

Ben and Nikki’s sizeable contribution to the Making Space programme follows our earlier show with the Turner Prize winning Richard Deacon, and pairs older work with those from more recent times. They compliment one another in the form of a mini retrospective, exploring the artists’ progressive interest over the last 30 years via architectural forms and spaces, alongside the graphical language of today’s modern world and how this is communicated.  

When we initially discussed the show with Jonathan and Langlands & Bell, we were delighted at the thought of neons, the film and graphical pieces, but personally and selfishly, the prospect of bringing out of storage, exhibiting and providing repair to a work that in Traces of Living hasn’t been seen in exhibitions since the Serpentine Gallery show (also curated by Jonathan Watkins) of 1996 was a thrill, as I had seen the piece in both Ben and Nikki’s acclaimed Saatchi Gallery show of the early 90s, as well as at the Serpentine show itself.  

There is an elegant stillness in the lacquered white sculpture of Traces of Living. It’s a seminal Ben and Nikki work and is a time capsule of found objects, from walks undertaken by the artists in or around where they have lived in Whitechapel. On display within the 3 table vitrines there are tactile elements – a brick, a rolling pin, an eccentric heart shaped box seemingly wrapped in paper mâché and emblazoned with an arresting all searching eye.     

There is a series of co-joined candles and most arrestingly a mummified rat within a stale loaf, with its head buried within the bread and its features only partially seen. It’s a fantastic piece where found objects are displayed beautifully, alluding in the elegance of their display that these quiet objects have both quality and importance. At either end of the 3 table vitrines are two bespoke chairs, also white lacquered containing in one found objects again, in this instance a series of bundled combs and in the other an architectural model that we’ve subsequently learnt from the artists is a 3-dimensional representation of the basement space within the National Gallery in London.  

The piece in its entirety is thought provoking and beautiful and with the careful lighting that the team have worked together to create cast lovely shadows on the studios’ timber floor.    

I’ve been thinking about Traces of Living a lot, and it reminds me of the great poem by Octavia Paz - Objects and Apparitions - for Joseph Cornell.  

Paz writes;

‘Hexagons of wood and glass, scarcely bigger than a shoe box, with room in them for night and all it's lights.

Monuments to every moment, refuse of every moment, used: cages for infinity. Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice, pins, stamps, and glass beads: tales of time……

Joseph Cornell: 'inside your boxes my words became visible for a moment.’

This could so easily have been written for Ben and Nikki.

To you both, all at Apt would like to say an enormous thank you. Being able to enjoy these works for the summer has been a wonderful thing.