Outlook

'Outlook' was a site-specific installation for the garden of Pickford's House Museum in Derby, which has many fine windows, architecturally and historically defining the building. A series of freestanding steel 'windows' were mounted on poles in the box-hedged borders. They mimicked the scale and hierarchy of the house's windows, which change in relation to who would have been looking through them. The large hall and drawing room windows afford a much better outlook than the tiny attic bedroom windows. The installation appeared to create a negative space within the garden, as it represented the supposedly transparent parts of the building as free-standing objects, without any solid walls. It is a playful comment on the neo-classical architecture and on how life must have been in the past in Pickford's House for at least some of its inhabitants (women, servants) – quite restrictive, class ridden and inward looking.