Year 2132 - Wayne Sleeth - #smallworldfutures

Wayne Sleeth, #unsettledgallery No.6

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Wayne Sleeth
Year 2132

'Stand in line children, hold your partners hand, don't push'
The children crane their necks and jostle to get a view of the exhibit.
Safely encased in translucent aluminium sheeting, Exhibit Number 5 seems to hang in mid air, untouchable and pristine.
'Now class, can anyone tell me what we are looking at here?'
Dorotha puts her hand up, 'It's the RealPlant, one of the last RealPlants left alive since the Chromocrisis in 2085.'
There is a murmur of agreement from the fifty or so children in the class.
'Yes, well done Dorotha, this is a RealPlant, unpolluted by any of the genes that destroyed 90% of the planet's vegetation last century.'
'What's it for' asks Pimlico.
'Good question, any ideas class?'
'It's a small vegetable transformer, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars using sunlight as a fuel'.
'Yes, a very clever and elegant little transformer'
'It's quite pretty as well Ms Dalex, I like the colours'
'Mmm, yes I suppose so TamTam, I never really thought of that before. Does anybody else have anything to say before we move onto see the next exhibit? No? Okay, don't push, hold your partners hand, keep the noise down!'

Dean Reddick

Wayne Sleeth

You can find Wayne's Small World Future located down Gibbon's Rent alleyway at #unsettledgallery No.6. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

In his mature work since moving to the Lorraine region of France in 2001, Wayne Sleeth reiterates and re-explores the source and schema of his more formative sensations; the big skies above the flat lands of both the Lincolnshire coast of his father and the polders of maternal Flanders, where he also spent his childhood. The Lorraine region for this confirmed European is not only geographically strategic, but offers an echo of that very play of horizontality and verticality where the artist draws freely on “l’espace” as he knows and feels it, as far as the canvas edge…
http://www.waynesleeth.com/

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist and a lecturer. He uses a range of media and enjoys experimenting with casting processes using plaster, metal and resin to explore the tensions between organic and geometric forms, positive and negative space and the distortions that occur in producing casts. As an artist and art therapist Reddick has a keen interest in the role of art as a cultural phenomenon and as a container for inter-personal meaning. He enjoys working collaboratively and has been a regular exhibitor at Walthamstow's E17 Art Trail as well as exhibiting with CollectConnect. Recently he published Art Therapy in the Early Years: Therapeutic Interventions with Infants, Toddlers and Their Families (pub. 2016, Routledge) alongside co-editor Julia Meyerowitz-Katz.