Summer 2009
PUSHING BOUNDARIES
THE FUN OF THE FAIR
MATTHEW DARBYSHIRE • Artist
A large-scale and colourful funfair installation inspired by a road trip in a Vauxhall Astra is the latest innovation from the Vauxhall Collective. Now in its third year , the Vauxhall Collective continues to recognise and support emerging British talent in everything from film and fashion to photography and theatre. One of this year’s pieces (below) by artist Matthew Darbyshire (right) is a contemporary take on the faded funhouses that populated the funfairs and coastal amusement arcades of 1980s Britain. There are now only six classic funhouses left in the UK – characterised by wobbly mirrors, undulating floors and plastic ball pits – and Darbyshire set off in a Vauxhall Astra to investigate them, alongside significant works of recent public architecture, bringing his findings together to create a funhouse for the end of the first decade of the new millennium.
His installation is a riot of bright oranges, magentas, purples and neon greens. Architectural elements he appropriated include the Millennium Bull from Birmingham’s Millennium Point Arts complex, adorned with soft drinks cans; a mural from the Coin Street Family and Children’s Centre in Waterloo, London; and an oversized ear from an Orange mobile phone shop in Glasgow. Borrowed or remade (sometimes with a telling twist), each of these fragments corresponds to features found in the traditional funhouse – a nostalgic remnant of an earlier leisure age.
