Flood

Standing on one of the green terraces between the University of Worcester’s City Campus and the Severn, Flood is composed of a group of leaning blackened door frames. Their arrangement suggests a settlement now vanished. The form of this sculpture was inspired by the archives of a 2013 monsoon flood at the US military National Training Center at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, California. The flood resulted in significant structural damage to a number of installations, including the simulated ‘Middle Eastern’ villages used for counterinsurgency operations training.

Images of floods and their aftermath are an increasingly common sight on our screens and in print. We respond to those with horror and compassion certainly, but also often with guilty fascination at the strange spectacle. This is sense of bewilderment is exacerbated in Pryde-Jarman’s work by the unlikely nature of both a fake village and a flood in the desert.

Image: Stefan Handy for Meadow Arts

 

About the artist

Daniel Pryde-Jarman

Daniel Pryde-Jarman is an artist and curator whose research interests include institutional critique, the politics of display, and forms of self-organised artist-led culture.

Pryde-Jarman has been involved in setting up several artist-run spaces, including Grey Area in Brighton (2006 – 2012), and is currently Director of Meter Room project space & studios, an arts charity based in Coventry that provides affordable studio space to recent art graduates. Pryde-Jarman trained at the University of Brighton and Chelsea College of Arts, and completed his PhD in Curatorial Practice at Coventry University.