Background
Today, the work of estranged_space has been relaunched, defined by the collaborative efforts of Mathew Emmett and Jason Clark, merging the disciplines of architecture, art, cartography, multimedia performance and visual communication. They can work with a range of clients — site owners, developers, institutions and companies — who wish to subject spaces to closer examination, understanding and (re)interpretation.
They deploy a wide range of tools and techniques to explore the notions of perception, (re)interpretation, narrative, place and non-place, with particular experience in site-responsive interventions in spaces which are contested, unsettling, hidden, lost, peripheral or displaced. They extend this applied learning and research across a wider spatial practice that also concerns itself with the agency of mapping. the topologies of space, or real and yet imagined worlds — the near and the elsewhere — looking for narratives within spaces to amplify, re-present and re-frame them.
Themes
Research is concentrated around three core themes:
1 ) Mapping and Perception
The study of perception allows the examination of the reciprocal effects of space (space acting upon the mind; the mind acting upon it). Mapping tools enable us to scrutinise and better understand these interactions, enabling us to interrogate reality’s elasticity.
2 ) Installation and Projection
This seeks to redefine and challenge the understanding of ‘estranged spaces’ through a range of experimental practices including site-specific installation, film and projection. Works include the generation of new spatial configurations that affect action, connections and meaning.
3 ) Heritage and Authenticity
Heritage and Authenticity are contested terms. Exploring and testing these concepts to sites of historical and cultural significance is carried out through the application of theory (drawn from archaeology, architecture, psychology, philosophy and cultural studies), and mediated through art and design practice.
If you would like to discuss a potential commission, or the work of estranged_space further, please get in touch with Mathew or Jason.
Mathew Emmett PhD AADipl BSc ARB RIBA
Mathew is an academic, architect and artist drawing upon intermedia disciplines spanning video, sound, photogrammetry and digital technologies. His projects include immersive installations, large scale public realm audio-visual events, electronic soundscapes, mixed media prints and drawings.
Mathew has exhibited widely, with his latest work featuring at ‘A Hard Rain’s a – Gonna Fall’, the Jamestown Arts Center, Rhode Island, USA. In 2022, his creation, ‘St Sebastian: Plague Memory’, was shown at La Notte dei Musei, Museo dell’arte Classica, Rome, Italy. In 2016 Mathew performed ‘Sender/Receiver’ at the opening of the Blavatnik Building, Tate Modern. Other notable collaborations have included with the Kraftwerk co-founder, Eberhard Kranemann; Node electronics composer, Dave Bessell; Candoco Dance Company founder, Adam Benjamin; cyberspace architect, Neil Spiller; and the late and renowned cultural theorist, architectural historian and landscape designer, Charles Jencks.
Jason Clark MA MSIAD FRGS
A cartographer and designer, Jason’s focus on mapping, geographical techniques and spatial thinking, combined with design training and critical thinking, means he is happiest occupying the space between disciplines, asking questions, reframing problems and finding solutions.
Jason’s primary interests revolve around the role cartography has played, and now plays, in our relationship to space? Have new mapping tools changed the way we respond to and engage with spatial data? Does it really make sense of places we’ve never been to? Is our relationship with mapping different now? What cultural attitudes hide inside our maps? To what extent is this a reflection of the technology or of new forms of representation and graphic communication? Are we seeing the evolution of new mapping paradigms in the spatial and projective disciplines that realise a change of form for mapping in transdisciplinary modes of practice? All questions that have interest for Jason in both practice and research.