Rebecca Chesney, Conditions at Present, presented at Towneley Hall during BTB23, and Harewood House for the 2024 Harewood Biennial.
Conditions at Present is a tourable installation by artist Rebecca Chesney.
Tents provide shelter in times of crisis or displacement, but perform a very different role at music festivals where it is more common for cheap tents to be discarded than taken away by their temporary inhabitants. With the growing practice of charities collecting discarded tents for reuse, more are left behind as their users imagine they’ll ‘go to a good home’, without thinking about the social and environmental costs that produce them so cheaply.
Using fabric from discarded tents gathered in collaboration with FWRD Together (Festival Waste Reclamation and Distribution), Rebecca Chesney’s field of windsocks serves as an indicator of current conditions; a barometer of the climate crisis of our own making.
Conditions at Present, Harewood Craft Biennial 2024, Harewood House, Leeds and tent collection at Beat-Herder – Photos courtesy of the artist The installation consists of 25 windsocks on 5 metre masts. The windsocks dance in a light breeze orientating themselves in choreographed unison or behave more individually creating turbulent patterns in changing thermals, gusting winds or gales.
The masts are placed 3.5 metres apart allowing visitors to enter, wander and explore the installation. Over 20,000 visitors experienced the artwork at Towneley Hall during the British Textile Biennial in October 2023.