Helena Wee

Tecton Colony Flatpack


Tecton Colony Flatpack Tecton Colony Flatpack Tecton Colony Flatpack

The pieces making up this installation are lenticular prints, with magnetic backs and edges, suggestive of land, sea and air organisms. When a viewer picks up a Tecton and arranges it on the metal whiteboard, depending on your viewpoint something in the piece appears to move and a symbiotic relationship is formed. Whiteboarding is a computing term describing the placement and alteration of shared files on a shared online notebook by many different users in real time. The colony is presented in the form of a flatpack, much like one you might find at Ikea for a sleek piece of aspirational home furnishing. A piece of paper indicates the pieces that should be present and how they might be put together in three-dimensional space. The pieces themselves are shaped like small Tetris computer game blocks, and sometimes there seem to be more or less of them than indicated on the instructions. There are references to Modernist architecture and accessible design. Different users come and go producing new Tecton colonies, whilst at the same time destroying old ones. Processes of renewal and entropy are occurring in parallel. The fragility of the work is indicative of the fragility of the status of these organisms and the structures they congregate in.