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Geraldine's Lost Pagodas are the first of three contemporary art installations,
three annual commissions for the Royal Pavilion.
The series is called Pavilion Contemporary. We are working with contemporary artists
who are going to create work especially for the Pavilion
which relate to the history of the Pavilion,
perhaps hidden stories, perhaps looking at different aspects.
The idea is to bring the Pavilion to life in different ways.
Hopefully it will attract visitors to look at objects in the Pavilion in different ways
and to think about the narratives which might be in addition to what they see here.
Well, someone suggested to me that I should apply for the Museum Maker commission
particularly for the Royal Pavilion, Brighton one, as it's a building I've always loved.
I went along and had a look at it, and went on a tour of the building with David Beevers,
and I was absolutely fascinated and intrigued by the stories that came up.
He showed us the two pagodas that were either side of the mantelpiece in the Music Room
and explained that on the other side of the room there had once been six of them.
I was really intrigued by this idea that there had once been more pagodas in the room.
There were no fewer than eight pagodas in the Pavilion.
These were made of porcelain, and were enormous porcelain towers.
There were four in the Music Room, sixteen feet high;
two more in the Music Room, twelve feet high;
and two further twelve foott high pagodas in the Long Gallery
They were made in China, in Canton, which is modern day Guangzhou.
They were made specifically for export to the West.
Pagodas in this form were not used in China.
They were models, of course, of Chinese pagodas, which vary in height but are typically about 200 feet high.
Chinese pagodas were sort of relic towers, so to speak. Relics of the Buddha were often kept in Chinese pagodas.
Chinese pagodas were also more mundanely used as navigational aids on rivers.
The porcelain pagodas here at the Royal Pavilion were pieces of Western exotica.
They were commissioned on behalf of George, Prince of Wales. They were extremely expensive, extremely rare,
and luxurious items. The porcelain pagodas that were here
are now at Buckingham Palace, as part of the Royal Collection.
They were removed by Queen Victoria when she sold the Royal Pavilion.
There was no greater assemblage of these things and the ones here in the Pavilion were perhaps
the most splendid ever made.
I've always been absolutely fascinated by pagodas.
My grandmother used to have a miniature interior garden
and she used to have little Chinese figures and, a sort of willow pattern, there was a little tiny Chinese pagoda.
I come from south west London, and when I was about nine I went to Kew Gardens
and there I saw the Kew Gardens pagoda.
From that point I've been in love with pagodas ever since.
I went away and had a think about what I would come up with
and then I realised I would like to replace the lost four pagodas
that I imagined might be in the building.
I approached a really fantastic set builder, visual event maker and props company called Applied Arts
who are based in East London and make the most beautiful, beautiful things.
I made a model of the lace pagoda to see if my dreams might actually come true.
They said 'yes, we can make this'.
I was very much inspired by the sense of fun, the sense of beauty.
Every single room has a pleasant surprise, and every time you think you know what you're going to see, it changes
and you're in a different world. I think it is one of the most extraordinary buildings in the world.
I also do site specific performances, and when people ask me
what that means, basically it's finding a site that inspires me to create something that's inspired by the site.
I love working in places that already have their own history and bringing them back to life.
They're often empty, they're often disused, and they're about to be transformed or pulled down.
I get in, in between the transformation.
I love going into a building and getting a sense of the atmosphere that surrounds it
I see it very much like peeling off the layers of wallpaper and revealing what's underneath.
First of all, I started off only working in empty buildings, but I gradually began to start working in
buildings that actually have a life that goes on at the same time.
What fascinates me is the architecture of the space. It's from the architecture and the sense of it
that I feel I can create narratives, and imagine what might have happened before
who might have walked down the corridors, who might have opened that door.
For somewhere like the Royal Pavilion, it's a culmination of that sense of space
and that sense of a design which for me has been quite challenging to work with.
When a space is empty you can place things in it.
When a space is so beautifully designed and already exists in its own right,
I want to make sure that I'm adding to it rather than competing with it. You can't compete with the Royal Pavilion.
I also want to put in images where people go 'Has that always been there?' or 'I've never seen that before'
or 'Something's changed'. I want to have a contemporary feel.
I'm not trying to recreate the pagodas that are already there. Somebody would be able to do that much better than me.
What I'm doing is actually creating an object that I think hopefully has its own atmosphere and spirit around it
that reflects all the things that I think may have happened in the Royal Pavilion and in Brighton.
Geraldine's Lost Pagodas is only the second contemporary art commission we've
done in the Pavilion. The first was in 2010-11 when we worked with a ceramic artist
called Claire Twomey, who made 3000 black ceramic butterflies,
which she installed in the ground floor rooms of the Royal Pavilion.
Visitor reaction to Claire's butterflies was quite divided, people either loved it or were very disturbed by it
but that's what the installation was about. It was called A Dark Day in Paradise.
We really want Pavilion Contemporary, the commissions we work with, to make people to look at them, be surprised
and interested and intrigued, and to bring out new things about the Pavilion.