How does one make the largest impact with the lightest footprint? Benjamin Ravenscroft and Sam Basu collaborated on this composite project which incorporates built structures, painting, sculpture and video.
Lovely Crinkle Crankle evolved through a dialogue between the two artists and their engagement with the buildings and philosophies of the pragmatic, visionary architect Laurie Baker (b. 1917 in Birmingham, UK). Since 1945 Baker has been designing buildings in the Southern Indian province of Kerala. Ravenscroft and Basu travelled to Thiruvananthapuram to meet with Baker, visit his buildings and the people who live and work in them.
Baker’s working methodology struck a chord with current dilemmas faced by contemporary artists: How to make a visual idea resonant and challenging in as concise and direct a means as possible? Can artists be socially engaged, responsible and generous without sacrificing creative freedoms? How can they continue to explore ideas of experimentation, responsiveness, failure, immediacy and self-reliance as a liberating end? This exhibition investigated those ideas.
