A Bath artist has created an installation on the Bathampton farm which is under threat of compulsory purchase if a Park & Ride is built on Bathampton Meadows, to represent what will be lost if the scheme goes ahead.
David Gillett, who has worked with among others Aardman Animations and the BBC, has created a 3D installation representing the colours of the meadows, with a series of coloured spheres suspended in the air and set against the backdrop of a concrete wall.
“I found this stark corner of untreated concrete in a barn on New Leaf farm, and it made visual sense,” said Gillett, who lives in Lambridge.
“You have the diversity of colours and shapes of the meadows, with each sphere in proportion to the frequency of that colour in the meadow, set against this monotone brutalist concrete which represents the car park they want to build here instead.”
The installation was inspired by a photograph taken by one of the local residents campaigning against the Park & Ride and used in a calendar of images of the meadows through the seasons.
“I’m a keen cyclist myself,” said Gillett, who also runs a photographic project for amateur photographers around the world.
“I know these meadows and New Leaf Farm. And when I heard about the campaign, it caught my imagination.
“We don’t want this very beautiful part of the world to be ruined by a massive car park, and I thought this would be another way of keeping the spotlight on this issue and getting the growing opposition to it heard.”
The installation is called ‘Atomised’ and can be viewed at New Leaf Farm until the end of January.
Gillett said he called it ‘Atomised’ because he liked “the duality of the word’.
“Atomised can mean the complete destruction of matter, which is what they will do to these beautiful meadows,” Gillett explained.
“And it can mean the deconstruction of something into its separate elements, which is what I’ve tried to represent.”