Simon Twose. Concrete Drawing, 2015. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Concrete /Cloud/ Research project
Concrete /Cloud/ is a work by Simon Twose that hovers between drawing and building. It is part of ongoing research into how designing and constructed space intersect; how materiality, space and time cross from drawing to building and building to drawing. Concrete /Cloud/ is in two parts: a large floor piece titled Concrete Drawing and a wall element titled /Cloud/.
With Concrete Drawing, I was interested in drawing directly with building.1 The work takes the surface of a single wall, from Te Horo house, and draws it at full scale in 2000kg of concrete, the material intended for the building. The wall surface is tilted over and laid horizontally in the gallery like a large landscape. /Cloud/ attempts to capture the strange presence of this architectural hybrid through a cloud of images. The project aims to distil an architecture of unfinished-ness and potentiality; neither drawing nor building, but an object that hovers between both.
Te Horo house is an unbuilt project on a rock-strewn site on the Kapiti coast of New Zealand. Te Horo house was composed by allowing dynamics of site and a complex domestic brief to jolt large concrete walls into a fluid arrangement. Concrete Drawing extends this interest in flows by drawing one wall surface of Te Horo house in detail. The wall surface records relations between unseen dynamics and matter in the performance of designing, such as the simple act of viewing a scale model, for instance. This finds its way into the surface as an array of small scale walls, rotated as if to view their qualities.
The small scale walls swarm over Concrete Drawing and coalesce into clusters, which are pulled towards several points in space. These viewpoints are encountered by people as they move around the object, engaging the viewer in movements that parallel those in designing; shifts in the clusters of small scale walls as the built object is walked around and connect with the simple rotation of models in the hands of the designer. This merges the space of design with that of the built. A field of thin paper images in /Cloud/ attempts to distil this in-between condition and is visual source material for future design work. This will feed back into the Te Horo house design which is an ongoing way of capturing such experiments.
The Concrete /Cloud/ project looks into the shifting ground between art and architecture, space and performance. Concrete Drawing and the /Cloud/ ‘draw out’ curious atmospheres that exist between drawing and building where the presence of both is strangely present.

1 Concrete Drawing was exhibited as part of Drawing Is/Not Building, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, April 24 – June 28 2015.