Loose Footings
Jen Berean & James Carey
As part of After RUINS, Nonfrasa & DESA, Ubud 2025
Curated by Krisna Sudharma
Exhibition text by Sarah Mosca
Loose Footings is a sculptural response to Ubud’s temporary, and often adhoc, street bollard infrastructure. Bollards globally are an urban tool used to define specific boundaries and thresholds that separate pedestrians, and vehicles, from moving from one space to another. Bollards are often linked with chains or rope, extending this boundary of separation. Unlike the permanent or fixed street bollards where the artists live in Australia, Ubud’s bollards are ‘loose’, allowing anyone who encounters them the opportunity to move them, to openly engage and participate with their forms and materialities. Loose Footings are a series of twelve sculptures across two locations – Nonfrasa Gallery and DESA, where the artists recently undertook an artist residency. These sculptures operate as street bollards, defining a boundary at two situations that can be moved and participated with according to their users’ desires. Their appearance picks up on the existing street bollards of Ubud, but slightly play on their forms, materialities, and weight. Linking the sculptures are handmade chains, made by the artists from existing and found materials that give an almost jewellery element to the brutalist sculptural footings. The steel posts are interchangeable with each bollard, once again giving powerful agency to those that encounter and choose to participate. Softening these twelve sculptures are intermittent screen prints that hang from the steel posts. This screen print is a distorted image of a pool of water taken by the artists, highlighting that water as a material has been used in the processes of making the sculptures themselves. Loose Footings becomes part of the existing urban fabric of its surroundings, quietly operating as both public sculpture and practical infrastructural tools.
concrete, steel, brass, acrylic screen print on organic cotton
dimensions variable across two locations (Nonfrasa & DESA)
