22 September – 28 October | Frome Amateur Boxing Club, just off Butts Hill | Frome
Originally published in Issue 3, The Impossibility of the Word
Who? Brian Griffiths
What? Brian Griffiths’ new site-specific commission for Foreground has been created especially for the recently vacated Frome Amateur Boxing Club. Tucked away in a small alley within the centre of Frome, the boxing club is a modest piece of vernacular architecture – a single storey wooden building of simple construction. The building is both physically hidden from the general public by its location but has also been an almost private space for decades, known and used only by club members.
Griffiths’ new installation will reveal this space to a public audience for the first time. In Griffiths’ hands the history of the Frome Amateur Boxing Club becomes just one narrative amongst many potential narratives at play within the building, all of which may be equally believable or equally doubtful. The building will become a space of potential – a space to exercise possibilities without fixed goals, where the art object is dragged into the same focus as its container and the world, producing a tension between building and contents, fact and fiction, now and then – a tension that seems to hold the faded and failing building together as much as the building seems to contain the objects and stories that are packed within it.
The Kidd is a name written on an old military kit bag from World War II, which finds itself part of a cast of utilitarian objects used to create a fiction within the space. It’s a nickname written rather quickly and charmingly in pen. It’s the name for heroes and anti-heroes from different times and places – Captain Kidd, the infamous Scottish pirate; Billy the Kid, the legendary American gunslinger; Eddie Kidd, the British motorcycle stunt rider. The Kidd is the embodiment of youth, ambition, and showmanship. The Kidd is an absent protagonist that becomes a dynamo for wide-eyed dreaming, for innocent ideas of community, for an account of an inexperienced individual in an unfathomably large and complicated world. Take this opportunity to revert back to the carefree mentality of childhood, where a cardboard box held the potential to be a racing car, or a tin can could be turned into a telescope. Much simpler times, and much more exciting. Rediscover the freedom and creativity of innocence.
When? 22 September – 28 October 2012
Where? Frome Amateur Boxing Club, just off Butts Hill | Frome
