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The Escaped Zoo first images

15/03/11 News
by Nathan Jones

We finished The Escaped Zoo installation on Friday. It's looking pretty nice. Here's a couple of images if you can't make it down to Lewis's to take a look.

Stretching across two windows in the old Lewis' building - which is being renovated by property developer Merepark - The Escaped Zoo is a re-working of a page of type for a 'street' context. By layering up levels of text and imagery, and playing with the textural nature of his medium, artist Sam Skinner has created a piece which reflects 'layers of meaning' and physically reproduces the themes of paranoia and 'impulsive wildness' in Nathan's poem.

The subject of the poem is the imaginary place that artists and writers go in order to create, and the installation brings this private and little-understood aspect of creativity into a public space.

"this is the zoo of escaped animals.
You write in the manner of a paddle being utilised for fending.
Writing as if the sentence were a head being swung
from one member of the audience to the other."