Does The Iterative Fit

DOES THE ITERATIVE FIT was a temporary publicly sited sculptural and audio artwork installed in Granary Square from November 2017 to the end of January 2018. The invitation and brief to the artists was to create a christmas tree for the site.

Tatham and O’Sullivan’s sculptures and installations often question the accepted or expected outcomes of contemporary art practice. DOES THE ITERATIVE FIT is a response to and critique of its original commission brief to design a Christmas tree for a busy public space. The resulting sculpture, with accompanying soundtrack, reimagines the behaviour and meaning of a public artwork and considers the functions that art is expected to perform within the public sphere. The commentary, voiced by an actor, relates the experiences of an art object out in the world, projected through speakers that double as brightly coloured branches.

About the artists
Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan have been collaborating as artists since the mid-nineties and are known for making large scale colourful objects that frequently look like they could have been designed as much for the set of a play as for an art gallery. The works often feature figurative elements like faces and could be made to resemble people or animals, so that they clearly have some kind of personality.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan have worked collaboratively since 1995. Their work questions the roles and behaviours of contemporary art, often through re-staging and re-working a vocabulary of motifs, phrases and forms drawn from images, objects and histories of art and visual culture. Motifs such as pyramids, standing stones and cartoon-like animals occur as sculpture, painting and architecture alongside performance, photographs and text.