Central Park by based upon

based upon | Central Park

Central Park The making of the artwork

Central Park First published June 2012 by Based Upon Books, 8â&#x20AC;&#x201C;12 Creekside, London se8 3dx, Great Britain isbn 978 1 909011 03 8 All images ÂŠ Based Upon 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

based upon | books

Contents

| 7

Introduction | Ian Abell —

| 8 – 9

Artwork

Lines

| 10 – 39

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| 40 – 65

| 66 – 95

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Casts —

Seasons

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Introduction

Based Upon / Central Park was commissioned as the feature artwork for the lobby of the landmark development- the Lucida on Lexington and 85th, New York City. The Lucida piece was created by working within Central Park, onto which the building looks. Our initial idea was to play with the linearity evident in the city of New York as one stands in Central Park and looks though the trees to the rising buildings behind. On our visits to the park, we made photographic studies of the linearity and it is from these photographic documents that we composed the piece. The work also reflects the four seasons, familiar to any friend of Central Park. There are some special landscapes on our planet that can express all four seasons on a single day and Central Park is one of those. We experienced all four seasons in a single weekend in January when we visited the park. The four seasons are expressed in the final work in gentle fading tones of metal, working from platinum hues to antique gold. Each mark within the final 6.6 metres by 2.3 metres piece can be traced back to the park. We collected many casts, moulding from drumlin rocks, carved graffiti, the splits in benches as well as the parks numerous species of trees and their leaves. The casts became a palette back in our studio when they were layered within metal or encapsulated within resin to define the essence of the park through its textural landscape. We would like to thank the Extell Development Corporation and S. Russell Groves for this commission. Ian Abell Based Upon co-founder

Lines

Each time we look at New York we are taken by its grid: the geometric lines of its intersecting streets and avenues and the uniformity of its skyscrapers. Looking through the trees and the buildings behind we saw the city in a new way. Its trademark skyscrapers became veiled by the trees and their canopies, taking on a mysterious coyness,w quite at odds with the way they tower over mere humans at street level. The repetition of line at varying thicknesses of trunk and the rigid architectural mouldings of the buildings beyond gave the sense of a barcode, a testimony to New York’s roots as the world’s capital of commerce. The spirit of New York’s commercial culture is asserted as the graphic of a barcode yet the towers that house its corporations shy away beyond the trees. The city is given back to nature and to the skyline that was dominated by trees as recently as 400 years ago when there wasn’t a single building here. This is New York before the most unusual deal in its history when the settlers arrived and acquired the air, the sea, and the sky from the Native American’s, who bizarrely had imagined these things couldn’t be bought or sold.

Casts

To capture the spirit of the park we were intent on making the entire 6.6 m x 2.3 m work from casts and rubbings taken within the park. We cast from the splits in an old bench, the drumlin rocks on which the entire city is built and from the bark of the American Sycamore tree. Our blue spots make a instantly recognizable mark on the landscape. Alginate powder is mixed with water and usually goes off in a few minutes and allows us to grab a fast cast from which we can make a more permanent silicon back in the studio. We had to be at our best as all of this was done under the spotlight of NY1, New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s news channel who were filming a reportage on us to air that day. However in the sub zero temperatures of Central Park that weekend the material would not behave as it should, which made casting on vertical surfaces very tough, especially having submerged our hands in freezing water to make the paste. Sometimes it took an hour for a cast to go off when it normally takes two minutes. When casting from the rocks we applied the paste to the dry surface and by the time the mould was ready to be removed over an inch of snow had fallen, leaving a beautiful void in the snow where the mould had been removed. Back in the studio the rubbings of graffiti from trees and the moulds of the natural elements were transformed into fine metal casts that are then placed within the work. The trees were created by laying up casts of bark in varying tones of metal and then encasing them beneath pigmented resins. The parks floor was pocked with the impression of the various leaves and branches we had collected from it.

Seasons

The client who had commissioned this piece was keen that it should express the four seasons and we were blessed that over three days we got a glimpse of each in central park. Our palette of metals was created based on the photos we captured of fallen leaves, of acorns trapped beneath ice, the vivid green of laburnum and the way the sun bleached the trees as it reflected off the snow. We developed a technique which enabled us to create a transition of metals fading from the cool of aluminium and adding varying tones of bronze to warm this up into spring, bringing in brass for summer and copper to create reds into autumn.