'Sheds of The Valley'

Solo Exhibition commissioned for The Bug by Analogue Farm, Whitworth, Rochdale, featuring 30 ‘shed’ sculptures, including 6 brand new ‘LockDown’ sheds, The Bug, Tong Lane (opposite Acre street),Whitworth, Rossendale. Opening preview night 7-9pm Friday 23rd July 2021 Show open 23rd July – 20th August 2021. Jill Randall’s work often reveals the sublime and beautiful, the poetic and resonant in bleak and unpromising places, and often involves making work with and from post-industrial, toxic, or spoiled environments. The ‘Sheds of the Valley’ sculpture series presented at The Bug is a large and ongoing work incorporating the ‘Sheds of Rossendale’, ‘Lockdown Sheds’ and ‘Sheds of Bocholt’. These works explore the overlooked and secretive, celebrating the “ad hoc” and improvised. They began when Randall moved from Manchester to semi-rural Lancashire, where geography and topography have determine settlement and building. Randall noticed the many improvised (and possibly illegal!) architectural constructions within this landscape when travelling to her studio ; sheds, lean-tos, pigeon shed complexes, barns and industrial buildings. Randall is intrigued by the materials used in the sheds and structures , often reclaimed and improvised doors, windows and fragments sourced from other buildings. Randall is intrigued by this conquering of geography and the assertion of ‘territory’, the rural and industrial interfaces of these places, and the communities that have settled and inhabited them. They also explore the relationship of people to place, re-examining land and landscape, people and industry. Removed from their context , these buildings have been lovingly and accurately recreated, “model-railway” -style, with painstaking attention to detail, using recycled wood, paper and card, finding material equivalents for corrugated iron, wood and glass. The body of work has developed to focus, especially in the ‘Sheds of Rochdale’ series, on unusual buildings or details of buildings lifted from their original context, often becoming abstract compositions and sculptural forms in their own right. They also celebrate renewal and change, and make us aware of life’s impermanence and transcience, of the constant state of building, demolishing, flux and change, the passing of time and the tide of history. Part found-object, part sculpture construction, they also play with sculptural language and notions of the beautiful and ugly. Jill Randall July 21