Bridewell Magistrates Court
Unstable Monuments, Bristol
Commercial paint charts present colour as something limitless: hundreds of named shades offered as choice, arranged in grids that make abundance look orderly. They are familiar objects, and faintly overwhelming ones. This work begins with the suspicion that most of what they offer is unnecessary.
Against that range sits a single repeated unit. White LEGO pieces are placed onto the individual colour segments, one to a square, until the chart reads less as a menu of possibilities than as a structure: a grid of small objects occupying space rather than describing it.
Process
The placement is systematic rather than composed. Repetition imposes order on something visually excessive, and the accumulated pieces give the chart a depth it never had: each unit casts its own shadow, and the printed surface becomes physical, closer to masonry than to paper.
In other pieces the colour is stripped away entirely. What remains is the chart’s underlying grid, embossed and torn, with the paint names still legible beneath the damage. These works record what has been removed rather than what was on offer: a structure of absence.
In 2022 these ideas were adapted for Unstable Monuments, an exhibition in the former magistrates’ court and jail on Bridewell Street, Bristol. The work was installed in the stairwell connecting the courtroom to the cells, where glazed white tile already supplied the grid the paint charts had stood in for.
Here the pieces returned to full colour, set one to a tile up the curve of the stair. LEGO carries childhood and construction with it, and against the institutional order of the building the intervention reads as both obedient and disruptive: temporary units suggesting that fixed systems can be altered by very little.