The Laundry Room book by Anagram Books Ltd – 2013

Anagram Books Ltd
The Laundry Room by Richard Wentworth & Michael Marriott, published by The Everyday Press, 2013.
contact@anagrambooks.com
The Laundry Room is a project curated by Maiko Tsutsumi & Eduardo Padilha (BalinHouseProjects). The Laundry Room project features works by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott. The exhibition and an accompanying series of events were held in September/October 2012 at BalinHouseProjects. The project, inspired by Wentworth’s Making Do and Getting By, explored the recent transformation and cultural shifts in the Borough/Bermondsey area, through a series of events and dialogues. The exhibition, a display of Wentworth’s photographic work and an intervention by Marriott was created as a response to the physical and historical features of the location: the former laundry room adjacent to BalinHouseProjects, located in a 1930s housing estate. Texts by Eduardo Padilha, Maiko Tsutsumi, Michael Marriott, Richard Wentworth.

25 limited edition with two signed and numbered prints by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott. contact@anagrambooks.com

Michael Marriott Untitled 2013 24 cm x 34 cm Silkscreen silver paper on 250 grams

Richard Wentworth London March 2007 24 cm x 34 cm C-print on 208 grams paper

BalinHouseProjects
BHP is an artist-run, not-for-profit space by artist Eduardo Padilha at his flat in Balin House, Tabard Gardens North Estate. It provides space for exhibitions, dialogue and platform for connection with other artist-run spaces and organisations. It also creates an opportunity for the Estate’s residents to experience contemporary art of a professional and international standard, locally and in a familiar environment.
Contact: eduardo@balinhouseprojects.com

The Laundry Room at BalinHouseProjects An exhibition by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott
BalinHouseProjects is an artist-run non-profit space in London SE1. BHP started in 2006 to provide space for dialogues and a platform for artists to make connections with other artist-run spaces and organisations. Located in a council flat in Borough, it has been offering the local residents of Tabard North Gardens estates opportunities to engage culturally in their own environment without feeling intimidated by the larger cultural establishments. The results of those very eclectic social gatherings have brought forward new ideas to engage further with the local community.

BHP is now coming to a close of a cycle, with the intervention in its space at the former laundry room of the Balin House building by Richard Wentworth and Michael Marriott. It will be the first time that the artist and the designer, who have been familiar with each other’s works for 20 years, to collaborate in a project.
In the late 1960’s Richard Wentworth lived off the New Kent Road where he witnessed the demolitions which led to the construction of the Heygate Estates in the early 1970’s. It was during this period that as a ‘foreigner’ in the SE17 and SE16, Wentworth made the early photographs which later became known as ‘Making Do and Getting By’ and ‘Occasional Geometrics’.*
Michael Marriott’s diverse practice is informed by a deep passion for the elemental nature of the project at hand and the stringent and honest handling of all materials involved. He spends ‘a lot of time observing and studying things and the world, analysing objects consciously and unconsciously in terms of material, function, use, misuse, form, colour, texture, finish, fixings, age, patina, junctions of line and material’.
The room, originally constructed as a laundry room that had changed its function as a storage room, has been a neglected corner of the building in the last decades. Here The Laundry Room will be a space to exchange, provoke or evoke thoughts, to rediscover old habits, to discuss the fast changing of technology and the lost function of some devices that are still vivid in our memory by sound and sight. The space will also let us reflect on the sudden effect of gentrification in its neighbourhood and the consequences of the economical values imposed by it.
This project includes the making of a book, a walk and talk, in collaboration with organisations such as Camberwell College of Arts, The Cuming Museum in Southwark, South London Gallery and the local T&RA.
The Laundry Room is a project by Eduardo Padilha and Maiko Tsutsumi
Exhibition dates: 29 September to 28 October 2012 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 14:00 Admission by appointment only. Please contact eduardo@balinhouseprojects.com
*Richard Wentworth will be part of the upcoming Serpentine Gallery’s Memory Marathon.
(www.serpentinegallery.org/2012/10/memory_marathon.html)
Address: BalinHouseProjects Flat 22, Balin House Long Lane London SE1 1YQ
For further information contact Eduardo Padilha:
eduardo@balinhouseprojects.com
M. 07813 949080
balinhouseprojects.wordpress.com