Folly

Exhibition of work by Sarah Cole and Anne Eggebert, made in response to the regeneration of Valentine's Mansion and Gardens in Ilford, London.

The exhibition included videos and drawings, in the main gallery and dovecote, and referenced ideas about place, leisure and performance.

Their video work sought out the sites in Venice of the wallpaper’s drawn motifs, found in the attic of Valentine's, alongside a series of photographs capturing a 21st century leisure pursuit, free running, around the mansion’s follies. Freerunner athletes test the historic landscape not as a view but as a multiplicity of surfaces to be physically encountered - the folly of a playful and foolhardy action that finds a use for the ‘useless extravagant structures’ of the historic landscape. A play on space that finds an alternative trajectory through it as all elements encountered within the landscape become surface.

• http://www.landscape.ac.uk/landscape/eve...