A Cottage Year’ is comprised of 52 different video artworks. Each tells an abstracted story about the natural environment during the last years that the Commandant’s Cottage stood. Our artwork is cut into 52 different ‘weeks’, where each week of the year a different artwork of ours will be projected on the Printery Building. You can return multiple times a year and see something different.
These 52 weeks, combined, tell a year-long story of what the weather and environment was like over 52 weeks of the cottage’s life. We don’t have enough data for one particular year, so we are using what data we can find from the early 1860s, around the time that the cottage was removed, as well as some research into surrounding decades as general inspiration to bring together one year of environmental and weather data. It is also because of this that we need to fill in gaps and partly-fictionalise. This is an experiment in creating 52 separate digital artworks under a giant year-long theme. This opens us up to the potential of experimenting with very different aesthetics in order to tell the story of the environment around the cottage and how it moved through the seasons from Spring through to Winter. We want to play with this by approaching each week from different aesthetic perspectives. We’re hoping that by rethinking the artworks we create for each week, there is always something fresh and interesting about the wall for return visitors.
