Work with New British Art
Mark Halliday is a founder of the artist collective, New British Art.
Blue Bell Hangar
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The Blue Bell Hangar project comprises a sculpture and a series of outcomes, reflections and events around a celebrated experimental kite called The Cygnet, made by Alexander Graham Bell at the turn of the 20th Century. Bell’s kite was constructed as a vehicle for experimentation into flight and the principles of lift. Made up of a thinly cut, spruce dowel tetrahedral skeleton, carefully engineered steel connectors and a silk cloth covering, the kite flew successfully in 1906. This was later developed further into the wing of an aircraft capable of providing enough lift to raise two adult men into the air. The kite was made and flown at a moment in history when mechanical and scientific experimentation was producing a new world aesthetic: functional form was infiltrating the visual arts and modernism was seeded. Bell’s Cygnet resembles a modernist sculpture. A great dark mass which, from a distance, seems to float impossibly above the ground and forces the viewer to question their experience of the physical world and the imagined interior of this object.
The Blue Bell Hanger Project is ambitious in physical scale and draws its meaning from a historical context strongly associated with the birth of manpowered flight and the spirit of experimentation ushered in at the beginning of the 20thCentury. It could be seen as an a ambitious utopian metaphor worth re-invoking at the outset of the 21st.
A lead artist with the collective New British Art, Mark Halliday worked to reconstruct this object as a sculpture. Like Bell’s, it is made from 1604 tetrahedral modules united in a triangular section about 40 feet long and 12 feet by 12 feet by 12 feet. Each of the individual modules was made of wood and silk by each of the artists in the group. The completed sculpture was displayed at a public event in the blue bell hangar, St Athan former military airbase in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales on 27th March 2010.
The sculpture was then transported to the home of Mark Halliday at Cilyrynys in Carmarthenshire, Wales where a performative event took place with the artists and an attempt was made to fly the work.
Award-winning film-maker John Minton documented the project throughout and an illustrated publication with a collection of reflective writing was produced.
Sal Venezia
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As a lead artist with group New British Art, Mark Halliday was short-listed by the Arts Council of Wales with site specific artwork Sal Venezia as the entry for Wales at the Venice Biennale 2011.
The artwork was conceived as a response to the historic use of the natural topography of the Venetian lagoon where salt has been extracted and utilised since pre-Roman times.
Mark Halliday produced a series of drawings to illustrate the components of the sculpture.
The sculpture was to be installed at San Giorgio, an island in the Venetian lagoon, using solar energy to evaporate a shallow pan of sea water and then to collect the resulting salt to be displayed in an exhibition with film-works and drawings in a gallery on the mainland.
The artwork Sal Venezia was conceived therefore to comprise a kinetic and a time based component and designed to evaporate and dry out a contained floating field of sea water at low tide and then re-inundate the field when the tide comes in again. The work has then – a wet period when the tide is in and the whole thing is flooded – a period when the sea water boils as the tide retreats and – an arid period when the water has been evaporated and the salt is visible in the field pan. The cycle repeats throughout the day, its duration dictated by the rise and fall of the tide and the availability of sunlight.
The salt would be harvested following the evaporation period and deposited in a separate gallery setting, slowly creating a growing mound of salt over the duration of the project. This salt would be displayed on the gallery floor in conjunction with a high resolution film showing the evaporation component of the sculpture in action.