Outwith is a collaboration between Sally Underwood and Roxy Walsh. Their ongoing research explores co-habitation, shelter, dwelling and time, exploring how gallery space is inhabited and lived by the bodies within it. Dwellings and small architectures are central to these explorations: artworks sited within other artworks.
UnderwoodWalsh were invited by Jessica Kenney to make a site specific installation for Art Exchange, the gallery of the University of Essex, for January/February 2015.
The campus is a spectacular collection of largely brutalist buildings set in Wivenhoe park, rolling parkland made famous by John Constable’s 1816 painting. The predominant materials on campus are concrete and engineering brick. Though faced with 1980’s (bijou postmodern) brick patterns, the building that houses Art Exchange has a heart of concrete like the others.
At Art Exchange, ‘shelter’ or location was provided a putative tree, echoing both the parkland of the campus and the shuttered concrete structure at the centre of the gallery building. Its exposed roots were bracketed by small walls of engineering brick and kindling in response to the spectacular use of engineering brick in the North Towers. The thin blue light of winter was echoed in watercolour above, and painted panels punctuated the space - sometimes pictorially but more often spatially, alongside large passages of painting directly onto the walls. Parkland outside of the gallery was made visible again by the uncovering of a picture window that had been walled in for a number of years.
An accompanying text was commissioned from George Vasey

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/20984