This autumn The Wapping Project shows made, unmade a film installation by artist Julie Brook. Julie Brook is a maverick, wild and innovative, who has roamed, and worked in a succession of uninhabited and remote landscapes for more than twenty years. Creating sculptures within the landscape she explores, each of her works are temporal, ephemeral and unearthly, made of the fabric of the earth itself. Made, unmade is an immersive installation comprised of 16 large screens which surround the viewer. Housed in the exquisite Wapping Hydraulic Power Station’s Boiler House, it is an extraordinary filmic record of process shot by Brook as she dug and moved rocks and stones in the deserts of Libya and Namibia.

During 2008/09 Brook travelled and worked in the black volcanic desert in central Libya and in the Jebel Acacus mountains in South West Libya. This led to further journeys in 2011/12 to the semi-desert of North West Namibia. In these remote regions Brook forged a series of sculptures from the landscape. Light and shadow are expressed in the transient works, which change according to the light and time of day. Brook has meticulously and sometime very crudely, documented the transitions as well as the back-breaking work involved in constructing her pieces. The result is a series of mesmerizing films, sometimes just dust filled screens, or the haze of heat as it burns off the desert floor. These are essentially existential works as a lone figure comes to terms with its place in the world.. The films are like messages from the front. The lack of artifice and self consciousness transforms these pieces into a renewed expression of the work itself.

made, unmade was previously exhibited (27 April to 1 June 2013) at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, one of the oldest weaving studios in the world. As part of this exhibition a rug inspired by Brook’s work was commissioned by the studio and produced by weaver Jonathan Cleaver. The handmade gun-tufted rug, one of the largest ever to be tufted at Dovecot, will be in London for the duration of the exhibition. Visitors will sit to observe Brook’s work, like a magic carpet transporting them closer to the environment and emotion of her work.

An exhibition catalogue with essays by curator and art critic Sacha Craddock and Scottish writer and broadcaster Richard Holloway is available for purchase.

Born in 1961, Julie Brook studied art at Marlborough College and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (1980-83). From 1989 Julie Brook has been living and working in remote landscapes in Scotland; Hoy, Orkney (1989); the west coast of Jura (1990-94); on the uninhabited island of Mingulay (1996-2011), Outer Hebrides. Her studio is based in the Isle of Skye. More recently she has had the opportunity to work in different parts of the desert in Central and South West Libya (2008-9) travelling with Tuareg guides; Syria (2010); North West Namibia (2011-12) travelling with Himba-Herero guides. Drawing plays a fundamental role in her practice. She makes large scale sculptural work outside using different materials using photography and film as part of the process of working. In 2009-10 Brook collaborated with the Fruitmarket Gallery on a 2 year educational project Air Iomlaid (on exchange) involving Gaelic medium children from Skye and Edinburgh.

The Wapping Project
Wapping Hydraulic Power Station
Wapping Wall
London E1W 3SG United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 76802080

Opening hours
Monday – Saturday from 12.00pm to 10:30pm
Sunday from 12.00pm to 5:30pm