Experience the union of architecture and nature in Boyce’s Turner-prize winning installation on show at Tate Britain.
Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce is interested in the physical and psychological experience of the built environment. His installations explore the modern urban landscape, particularly with reference to twentieth century modernist design, and its connections to utopian notions of living.
Like much of his work, Do Words Have Voices takes as it starting point concrete sculptures of trees designed in 1925 by Joël and Jan Martel(both 1896–1966) that Boyce sees as ‘the perfect collapse of architecture and nature’. The display brings together six works, including three ‘trees’ with a canopy of metal leaves and a table based on a library desk by modernist designer Jean Prouvé. Paper leaves are scattered on the floor as though blown by gusts of air emanating from Boyce’s modernist-style ventilation grills. The lights in the room are dimmed to evoke the atmosphere of an urban park at dusk. There is a sense that we have stumbled across a place where some form of human activity recently took place.
Boyce says he explores ‘the things we pass through every day and then occasionally catch a glimpse of and maybe see something that has a meaningful resonance. The work is to amplify those moments.’ Boyce was awarded the Turner Prize in 2011, which was held at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. This work, a recent acquisition by Tate, was conceived for that exhibition.
Martin Boyce: Do words have voices?
Tate Britain
Until 17 April 2017
[Source: Tate Britain]