Fountain Seating Commission
For The Amelia, Tunbridge Wells.
We love making for the public realm as they are often larger projects and designed to be used by a whole community for decades. The Fountain Benches for the new amenity building The Amelia, Tunbridge Wells began during lockdown in January 2021 and the initial research was conducted on-line. This is very unusual as Angus likes to visit a place and get a feel for the history, landscape and people before he starts designing. However pictures of the flowing water in the Georgian Dunorlan Fountain captured his imagination. A tall cascading form is appropriate for the location by a huge arched window in the stunning new linking piece between two public buildings. The intention is that it will draw people into the building and stimulate interest in exploring the collections. It provides a flexible place to gather and interact, and an interesting accessible experience sitting within and beside the installation. The image above shows a temporary location whilst the building is finished. The Amelia opened on 28th April 2022.
The Fountain Seating is made principally in oak and ash, with yew, walnut and sycamore in the central column. There is a woodwork tradition specific to Tunbridge Wells, called Tunbridge Ware, that combines naturally coloured wood to create a picture. In Tunbridge Ware blocks of different coloured timber are glued together then sliced into layers to create a repeating picture. The central column of the Fountain Seating is built up with blocks of wood in the same way, and the pattern in the centre of the central unit (below) is a slice of the column above. The light wood in the Fountain Seating is ash (representing water) and the darker horizontal surfaces and vitrines are fumed oak (representing soil). The central turned column is yew, walnut and sycamore (all their natural colours).
Four people can sit in the central section and the hope is that the chairs will be used flexibly to allow small groups to come and go from the installation.
Two techniques have been used for the curved wood in this installation: laminating and steam-bending. The tall arches are made by laminating. This involves cutting planks of ash lengthwise into thinner slices, and reassembling with glue between each layer and then pressing the layers over a curved former (the layers can slide as required to take up the shape).
Once dried, laminating creates precise, strong curved shapes. In the finished piece you need to look very closely at the arches to see the layers of wood.
The second technique to create curves is steam-bending, an exciting, fast, physical and unpredictable process that we love. Lengths of wood are steamed to soften the lignum (glue) between the wood fibres and whilst the plank is steaming hot and malleable we have a few minutes to bend it into the desired form using special jigs.
The chairs have a very complex steam-bend as one length of wood flows up one front leg, round the back-rest and down the other front leg. This creates the structure of the chair. We had to do a lot of experimentation with this new bending jig to have success, and it requires four makers, working in unison, to achieve the bend.
The steam-bent components are then left to dry, in a drying-jig for a few weeks.
The flowing forms of the bent wood-fibres can be clearly seen in the ash (above and below). The horizontal surfaces of the chair and central installation are a lovely dark fumed oak.
The bottom rail and the back-rest are also steam-bent ash.
In the summer of 2021 there was a week of public engagement to generate excitement and engage people with the new public art commissions for the Amelia. We asked people (mostly children) to draw something they would like hidden within the installation and this brought an interesting new dimension to the Fountain Seating project.
The children’s drawings were overwhelmingly of ‘nature’ and most were specifically of animals, insects, or plants, with a particular interest in ‘mini-beasts’. This reminds us that children inspect little details of nature - that adults may have stopped noticing or take for granted. There is currently great concern that we are losing insect populations as they are crucial for pollination, and provide food for birds and mammals.
Photo by David Hodgkinson.
This led us to Dr Ian Beavis, Research Curator at Tunbridge Wells Museum, and expert of local natural history, to identify insects, plants and animals associated oak and ash trees of the Weald (the area around Tunbridge Wells in Kent). We then selected a few species that resonated with the children’s drawings, and commissioned local artist, Rachel Backshall to create illustrations that could be laser-etched onto the installation.
We intended to show true to life wildlife illustrations of an appropriate size, and some were startling, for example the enormous Privet Hawk Moth above or the tiny oak-mining bee (Andrena ferox) which feeds almost exclusively on oak pollen and is considered threatened and requiring protection. Over fifty illustrations can be found hidden in the illustration, some are very obvious and others are tiny - such as wood-ants on the fumed oak.
The ‘Weald’ means woodland in Old English, and although the original woodland is lost, ash is now the most common tree in Kent. However many (potentially most) are dying from Ash Dieback Disease and sadly it seems likely that some of the species etched onto the Fountain Seating, will be lost within the life-time of the installation. Our hope is that increasing awareness and interest in local wildlife supports the museum’s intension to inspire and educate people about their local area. It may even encourage people to take small steps to support local wildlife, for example, by planting bee friendly flowers and tolerating some weeds in our gardens. Small steps taken by large numbers of people have a positive affect.
“We wanted to thank you for your hard work and dedication creating Fountain Seating for the Welcome Hall.
Everyone who has encountered it has been struck by its design, quality of making and attention to detail. It has been fully adopted by visitors already, who are intuitively understanding how to use it, setting themselves up in little groups of conversation as they take in everything else around them.”