MARCUS JEFFERIES
The Wilderness Tower
2020, Sharpham, Somerset. Sculpture, Wildlife Hide, Installation.
The Wilderness Tower has been commissioned by Adam Williams Design to sit in the land surrounding their Somerset studios. The sculpture is located at Glastonbury Heath marshes, renowned for its peat production and spectacular wildlife habitat.
The installation has a practical purpose - transforming from sculpture into a viewing platform for wildlife. It is a contemporary folly and a monument to brutalist architecture and design.
Sculpture, Installation, Bird Hide, Folly
Sculpture, Installation, Bird Hide, Folly
Outpost
2017, Somerset Levels, installation.
Outpost acts as both a sculptural installation and an exhibiting space for artists to make site-specific artworks.
Outpost takes inspiration from the agricultural architecture of the local area, referencing water towers, storage silos, and bird hides. It also takes on the presence of a watchtower silently surveilling the surrounding landscape.
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Phase 3
2016, Test Space, Spike Island, installation, sculpture, posters.
Collaboration with Colin Higginson.
Phase 3 is a multimedia installation exploring the rapid development of urban space in the city, the visual language of gentrification, and the selling of luxury lifestyles.
Through constructing and photographing a model, based on a generic modern apartment, we have created an artificial environment. Specially designed objects and artworks inhabit the fictitious room while their life-size facsimiles occupy the exhibition. These sculptures test the boundaries between what defines a contemporary sculpture and a desirable consumer object.
The Kiosk Project
2015, Installation, postcards, souvenirs
Collaboration with Colin Higginson
Part of the Art Weekender Bristol & Bath 2015
An interactive installation in the form of a kiosk, acting as a base to dispense free, purpose made, souvenirs that explore the nature of place, history and the value placed in traditional heritage.
The artworks purpose is to celebrate a forgotten part of the city centre by engaging people in conversation, gathering opinions and encouraging curiosity in the site and its importance to the city’s history.
Hannah More Primary School Public Art Commission
2015, commissioned by Bristol City Council
The redevelopment of Hannah More Primary School is part of Bristol City Council’s Primary/Bristol series of artist commissions for primary schools and forms part of as part of the Primary Capital Education Programme. As part of the development Bristol-based artist Marcus Jefferies was asked to develop a sculptural installation for the school front, incorporating seating, a teaching/play area, and shelter.
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The Nexus House Archive
2011-13
Photography, sculpture, drawing.
The Nexus House Archive is the fictionalised history of a mid-twentieth-century modernist house. The archive seeks to examine the lure of American modernist architecture embodied in the buildings of Californian architects such as John Lautner and Richard Neutra, whose work epitomized a vision of futuristic luxury and desire. Many of their buildings were used as Hollywood film locations and photoshoots - it is this blurring of real and imaginary narratives that underpin the working process of this archive. Found photographs and Holiday snaps sit alongside imagined events to illustrate the life and death of a building.
From Within The Bungalow
2010, curated show, Pill, North Somerset
Located in the heart of suburbia, seemingly frozen in time, the building epitomises the utopian optimism of the post-war period. The house is the childhood home of the curator Marcus Jefferies, who, by offering this space to the public gaze, re-examines our relationship to personal history, time and memory in a private, domestic world.
In the summer of 2010 artist, Marcus Jefferies Invited 12 artists to make new work in response to the bungalow and it's setting. The house was not to be turned into a gallery but left in its original state with the occupants going about their usual routines throughout the show. The artists were encouraged to make subtle interventions that blended with the decor of the house but also subverted its domestic calm.
