Perched on the edge of Britain, Midden Studio is a surreal atavistic building that reveals its secrets slowly. The spiky zinc-clad artist’s studio nestles by Allt ant-Sionnaich, a fast flowing burn on the west coast of Scotland. The building sits on top of a Victorian midden wall (formerly the depository for dung from the nearby stables).
- - -
The artist has a long connection to the site and much of her practice is associated with peoples’ relation to places, so the architects have enmeshed the studio with the landscape. The artist’s work often includes themes of tracking changes, focusing on art which leaves marks at once permanent and delicate.
Recalling simultaneously the vernacular agricultural buildings nearby, the granite rocks that punctuate the landscape, and the flourish of the ‘Scottish Baronial’ style, the new studio intends to silently immerse itself in this ancient landscape, only revealing its surreal details on closer inspection: the cantilever which apparently floats over the burn, the uncanny twin gables and the echoed stone mouldings. The granite rock surrounding the studio is echoed in the rusticated zinc, which reflects Eddie Blake’s ongoing preoccupation with the transmutation of materials.
For this project the team has developed an original embossed standing seam zinc system in collaboration with VM Zinc. It is a system that VM hope to expand to become part of their commercial range.
- - -
