Contraption: After Telford and Brown

(From Boat, Carriage, Plough and Harrow to Bridge)

Wood and plants

This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017). A Meadow Arts commission 2017.

David Bethell has been commissioned to make a new body of work, to be shown at Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, with one part of the work in the Walled Garden.

While Capability Brown and James Paine were sculpting and adorning Weston Park’s vast pleasure grounds, over the hills and only a few dozen miles away, the first furnaces of Coalbrookdale had started to produce huge quantities of iron. The instigators of the Industrial Revolution were looking at the landscape too, but with an eye for engineering and productivity. Soon brand new enterprises would flourish, such as the very first iron bridge. These two essential models, the Brownian idyll and the industrial one, stand in perfect opposition in this particular corner of Shropshire.

David Bethell’s latest contraption takes the form of a barge, carriage and agricultural machine all at once. Referencing both Thomas Telford, a leader of the Industrial Revolution, and Capability Brown, he refashions part of his unwieldy machine to build one half of a bridge. The other half is shown in an exact alignment at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery where it is surrounded by other parts of the contraption, selected works from the Museum’s collection and a film retracing the original contraption’s journey.

Image: David Bethell, Contraption: After Telford and Brown. (From Boat, Carriage, Plough and Harrow to Bridge.) Wood and plants. Meadow Arts commission 2017. Image courtesy of Meadow Arts. 

 

About the artist

David Bethell

David Bethell featured in All Alone at Croft Castle, 2021, and Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017. David Bethell was commissioned for Synthetic Landscapes by Meadow Arts.

Image: David Bethell, Contraption: After Telford and Brown. (From Boat, Carriage, Plough and Harrow to Bridge.) Wood and plants. Meadow Arts commission 2017. Image courtesy of Meadow Arts.