Mummy Hood Garden, David Steans (2023).
EXHIBITION: March - July 2023
OPENING TIMES: Visible everyday on Ilkeston Road. Full access to the garden Thursday - Saturday, 10AM - 5PM via Beam, bookstore and coffee shop.
WHERE: Primary’s Plinth Façade + Garden
Mummy Hood Garden is a new site to Get Lost: a garden, a hideaway, a forest, a URL, a model, a mock up, a work of fiction. It is situated in Primary's garden on the plinth at the front of our Grade II listed building. The street facing façade is visible from Ilkeston Road 24 hours a day, and the garden is accessible via the Beam cafe during opening hours.
Mummy Hood Garden is a physical extension of David Steans’ digital project Mummy Hood Nesting Forest, commissioned by Primary in 2022, which takes the form of a multipart story hosted online in its entirety via a bespoke website. A macabre story about storytelling, preparedness, and packable techwear, Mummy Hood Nesting Forest uses the provisional scenario of a hiker getting lost in the woods to conjure, recur, rewrite, and exhume. The website functions both as a specific context informing the story and a contrived situation for engaging with it. Accompanied by 3D animation, graphics, and acousmatic music, the injunction to get lost – in the forest, in the narrative, in the text itself — is accentuated by the design of the site.
Mummy Hood Nesting Forest is accessible at www.mummyhoodnestingforest.com
Access:
Mummy Hood Garden is visible everyday on Ilkeston Road. Full access to the garden is Thursday - Saturday, 10AM - 5PM via Beam, bookstore and coffee shop. There is no step-free access to the garden.
David Steans is an artist based in Leeds, working primarily in writing, moving image, sound and music. He uses recursive or 'nested' forms of narrative, storytelling, reality/fiction ‘blurring’, and a kind of ‘versioning’, whereby projects and ideas are developed through successive iterations (a process he associates with the mutations and spectral residues of genre dynamics). Some of his specific interests/ambitions in respect of genre include conjuring a sense of (genre) horror in and around the technologies, media and processes of cultural production (such as writing and filmmaking).
Recent work has been commissioned by/exhibited at: Deptford X, London; Pavilion, Leeds; Workplace Gallery, London/Gateshead; Triangle Arts, Brooklyn; Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark and The Tetley, Leeds. In 2021 he was commissioned to write a new text, Curtainz, for ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic’ (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press). His writing has also been published by Project X Foundation, Journal of Creative Writing in Practice and Ma Bibliothèque.
