Timber is a versatile material for various applications in addition to construction. Timber can also be used to create artwork. LeuWebb Project created the ‘Long Division’ outdoor installation.
The ‘Long Division’ is a large-scale outdoor installation which used timber. Image credit: Darren Rigo
This large-scale outdoor installation considers the fence as a marker for exclusion and the boundaries that are drawn around public and private spaces, circumscribing movement and subdividing the landscape.
While barriers are often implicated in larger concerns related to control and power structures, fences can also provide security and sanctuary. Drawing out these tensions, LeuWebb Project’s site-specific work ‘Long Division’ uses the fence as a starting point to consider how the land around Mississauga, Ontario’s Bradley Museum has been occupied, settled and colonised.
The land art installation features a series of loosely concentric rings with discrete openings, inviting participants to move within the layers of fencing, ultimately drawing people to the impenetrable centre ring. Looking both forward and backwards, LeuWebb’s ‘Long Division’ calls into question the site’s origins and settlement while looking to the fence to expand outward to the current and near-future ideas of nation and boundary, the impermeability of borders and the shifting relationships and attitudes toward migrants’ and refugees’ freedom of movement.
The artists further explain that this work “engages in a dialogue with the Bradley Museum site and adds a new critical layer that opens up questions about control, exclusion and inclusion, ultimately seeking to complicate the idea of fence through subverting its function and formal qualities, inviting the potential for play and participatory structural manipulations.”
