Regarding the residency, Labern says: “The intensity of the series of fifty Asylum and the ancient forest within which Artoll sits (opposite a women’s high security prison), became the context for my work from which the content evolved. Crazy Golf started with the idea of papering out a whole set of the four 1970’s plastic picnic chairs and its marble table which had been reclaimed by the moss and lichen, and moving this white sculpture created from random pattern cutting, to fill one of the three isolation cells off my studio space at Artoll; I began simply by turning two of the chairs around which immediately shifted the social meaning and subtlety changed the space into an aesthetic and openly absurd one, engaging an act of humour, creating a ‘shadow’.
Lack of time to create such an ambitious sculpture led me to change the intentions for the work. A series of interlinked works were pushed through as a body of developing ideas.
