The Granary

Jesse Pollock

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About the Artwork

The Granary is a life-sized sculpture of a traditional English grain store. Still in use in countryside locations such as the artist’s hometown in Faversham, Kent, granaries are an archetypal structure of agrarian and pastoral life. Towering at an unusual height, The Granary is finished in pearlescent candy orange, chosen to represent the desire to return to an idyllic, rose-tinted past.

Despite its indulgence to this fantasy, The Granary is also a beaten, forced and frustrated product. It reflects a brutal reality of material hardship, discord, class division and racism, as well as the fear and uncertainty of what we have lost or stand to lose from crises affecting rural life today. The Granary speaks as much to a need to overcome these crises as it does to the vexed rhetoric that underpins established visions of the nation, its heritage and our place within it.

Year: 2021


Copyright the artist. Photo: © Nick Turpin

Material

Powder Coated Steel

Dimensions

353 x 275 x 265 cm

Artist Biography

Jesse Pollock

b.1993, Gillingham, Kent, England. My recent works have been exploring arcadian visions, pastoral ideals yet with a dystopian undertone. These works consist of old fruit picking ladders, flagons and shotguns; all things I associate with ‘the olden days’ of Rural Britain, along with associated traditions. I am trying to explore why I feel so patriotic, how traditions are continued and question what it all means today. Using steel, aluminium and silicone to create sculptures which refer to the shifting—and conflicting—interplay of our relationship to landscape and tradition. My work juxtaposes bucolic convention with a distorted and contested reality.