Bamboo labs and ideas!

As part of the creative commission, myself and the other artists involved underwent a series of educational sessions including talks from learning professionals and discussions with other creatives looking at the properties, benefits and the potential of bamboo in its varying uses, primarily as a sustainable and regenerative building material.

Bamboo has the tensile strength of steel, very flexible and sustainable. For example, Trees that are used for timber usually takes around 30 years to produce yet bamboo on the other hand being a type of grass only takes 3! Around the world it is widely used as a building material and even used as scaffolding, the benefits are huge and questions are now being asked about how it could be used in the mainstream of our society and what other potential uses it could process.

One of the main focuses of this project is how we communicate this knowledge to a wider audience among the communities of Nuneaton and Bedworth in North Warwickshire. 

In October 2023 we delivered a workshop in Nuneaton town centre to ask this question. We used bamboo skewers to create hyperbolic structures that demonstrated the versatility and aesthetic of the material. Some members of the community took interest in what we had produced and agreed that it had lots of potential. 

The question now is how to best reflect the growing knowledge and beneficial uses of bamboo in a creative way to the wider audience. The first thing that sprung to mind was the use of bamboo as a symbol of collaboration. The tangible material evokes lot of talking points producing a lot of ideas of what could be made into a simple or complex structure. 

Part of the brief was incorporating a creative element that can enable and involve the community of Nuneaton and Bedworth in some way. This lead me to the idea of a school art workshop that I delivered at Canons Primary school in Bedworth a few months earlier. The Year 6s were studying the Coventry blitz during World War 2 for which Nuneaton and Bedworth were also heavily bombed. 

The destruction of the old Coventry Cathedral in which its ruins still remain to this day, still stands next to a rebuilding of the new cathedral for which the artist John Piper created wonderful stained glass windows that depicted a sense of unity. 

For me this struck a chord and so I set about facilitating 90 children to produce individual cells of a stained glass styled pictures using tracing paper and marker pens influenced from their study of the blitz. I then collected their individual works to combine them all into 3 large stained glass styled arch windows which they now proudly have on display at their school hall.

This set the tone for an idea of a similar collaboration that I had in mind potentially with the communities of Nuneaton and Bedworth. The bamboo sculpture could house a large group of individual works of art reflecting the their lives, history and observations.

My first concept which came from one of the educational bamboo labs, was that of a tower housing community art displayed on the structure. Each cell of colour represented would be a produced by a member of the community, giving them creative freedom of how they interpreted their message.

But what does the structure of the sculpture represent on reflect? Does it symbolise something of the past or something to aspire for the future or maybe both?

I analysed this process with the comparison of what bamboo stood for in my own eyes.  I saw it as a material that creates conversation, a material that inspires and promotes an intrinsic motivation to design, invent and engineer all in one go. 

Because of bamboos environmental aspects and the connection with renewable energy, it wasn’t long before I connected the dots and discovered the tower would take on the form of a Windmill!

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