wednesday
Michael Dean

For his commission for Intervention/Decoration Michael Dean imposed a series of fragile yet fascinating structures within an overlooked and unused garden behind the Brutalist former Frome Library at the heart of the town. Interlocking sticks emerged from concrete hexagons to support clouds of small black balloons. Reflective metal was folded in complex ways into crumpled forms. Ambiguous black images filled the shop’s windows and drew it into the garden’s new logic. Small pieces of intricately folded triangular paper covered in hair blew around the courtyard, appearing at once alien but also seeming as if they were the natural inhabitants of this space.

Dean’s black garden has its roots in writing. Short, poetic observations are transposed through abstract typography into idiosyncratic materials. Dean’s sculptures and images are in fact impenetrable models of words, hand built from images of skies, reflections and trees. This gives the works an internal logic but one that remains mysterious and elusive to the viewer. It is as if Dean’s work is projecting a perfect future for the former library – a beautiful but beguiling building where we might learn to read the unreadable.