For a moment a stage - photo-text works as part of installation

This practice-based research was commissioned by Public Art Leicester in collaboration with Leicester City Gallery and supported by Art Council England/National Lottery Fund. The commission was to create a photo-text based series of work to ‘interrupt’ the public access between two cultural venues – the City Gallery and New Walk Museum via New Walk and to bring this interruption to the rest of the City of Leicester.

The works For a Moment a Stage were created within the overlapping artistic genres of community/public art. The transient nature of the pedestrian traffic formed the parameters of the research. Along New Walk, randomly selected people were asked who they would like to be given free will. They were then requested to take up a momentary stage framed by the realities of what was going on around them. The resulting works were large-scale posters displayed on Leicester City Centre Adshel bus shelter advertising spaces in early 2001, thereby returning these brief encounters and momentary ‘stagings’ into the public domain.

These images were subsequently exhibited at the City Gallery in 2003 accompanied by a new work ‘A Space Between (a walking piece)’. This piece returned to the theme of interrupting public spaces and was filmed onto video over a 12 hour period from evening through to morning. The video records a solitary figure entering and leaving an outdoor location at regular intervals, the changing light marking the passing of real time The repetitive movement undermined narrative logic. The change in light marked real time. The new piece was intended to raise questions about the passing of time in For a Moment a Stage which in 2003 had been exhibited twice in very different venues (the bus shelters and the City Gallery).

Images of For a Moment a Stage are archived on www.leicester.gov.uk/publicart