Thinking of the Outside – Golden Garden

Thinking of the Outside was an exhibition of ambitious new art works presented in unusual sites across Bristol’s historic city centre in association with Bristol City Council and Picture This. Featuring moving image installations, painting, sculpture and live events Thinking of the Outside offered an intriguing route through the Old City, exploring the relationships between insider and outsider. The education programme was co-ordinated by Arnolfini. 

Silke Otto-Knapp
The artist’s research began with the work of landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752 – 1818), who worked extensively in Bristol and the surrounding region. Repton’s concept of the garden was an idealised version of ‘natural landscape’ through which one might ‘shut out the city’. Otto-Knapp’s works were not representative views of Bristol, but rather interpretations and responses to the landscape. 

Situations 

Situations is an art commissioning and research programme which operates from a University base, but produces artworks, events and publications outside the academic context. The programme was initiated in October 2003 by Claire Doherty, who is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of the West of England, Bristol. From the start, the programme’s guiding principles were to combine the ambition of a commissioning agency model with the critical rigiour of an academic research centre. We believe that artists have the capacity to bring something we might never have imagined to a particular place and we are committed to realising those dreams. Curating is far more than project management to us. It is a creative, critical and often passionate undertaking where we seek to understand the best possible means through which to support an artist to make an outstanding work of art in response to a specific situation.