Unfinished Neighbours

What happens when something becomes your neighbour before you know what it is?

Unfinished, human-sized figures enter a shared space. Made from simple materials, they have no prescribed identities, histories, or ways of belonging. You encounter them. And then you have to decide what to do.

Move one? Sit beside it? Leave it alone? Repair it? Give it a place to be? Make another?

You have to participate before you know.

A neighbourhood takes shape

The figures don't remain as they were placed.

One encounter becomes the condition of the next.

A relationship changes. Something is rearranged, added to, or left alone. Slowly, a neighbourhood takes shape.

No one designs it in advance. It emerges through the ordinary decisions of the people who enter it.

The figures are only part of the artwork.

The place matters. The people matter. What happens between them matters.

Participation before classification

We are accustomed to understanding something and then knowing how to participate. We identify it, we categorize it, we decide what it means. Then we know what to do.

Unfinished Neighbours reverses that order.

You have to find a way of relating before you know exactly what you are relating to.

The work creates a small space in which we can relate before understanding.

The artwork changes with its place

Unfinished Neighbours is site-responsive. The same figures make a different neighbourhood in a school, library, museum, public square, or festival.

Each place brings its own habits, expectations, rhythms, and possibilities.

The site is not a backdrop for the artwork. It is part of the artwork.

The work can unfold over a day, a week, or longer. It can be moved, changed, joined by someone new, and continue without the artist being there.

The neighbourhood keeps becoming.

Bring the work to your place

Exhibitions · Festivals · Schools · Libraries · Public spaces · Community settings · Site-responsive commissions