Artists and festival goers used a primitive form of photography to make art using sinlight and Flowers from New Covent Garden Market
Published on
June 7, 2016
Budding artists used sunlight and flowers to make a giant work of art as part of the Chelsea Fringe programme in Nine Elms on the South Bank.
The Capture the Sun project was led by photographer Melanie King and artists Corinne Silva and Alice Cazenave at the Embassy Gardens Marketing Suite in Nine Elms Lane, on Sunday 5 June.
A team of volunteers, some as young a five, used flowers from the nearby New Covent Garden Flower Market to make an enormous cyanotype photographic print on fabric. The process, which involves setting the artwork with chemicals, produces brilliant blue images that lent their name to architectural blueprints when they were first used.
The artwork is now hanging in the marketing suite of developer EcoWorld Ballymore next to the US Embassy construction site in Nine Elms.
Nine Elms and Vauxhall have a horticultural heritage stretching back hundreds of years to the time when it served as the market garden of London. The rich vein still survives today in New Covent Garden Market, which is the largest fresh produce market in the UK. The area also boasts Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where Londoners spent their leisure time.
The area, which is enjoying a rebirth thanks to a multibillion-pound regeneration programme, has hosted a raft of events to celebrate the fringe festival, which coincides with the Chelsea Flower Show, and is designed to champion community gardening projects across the world.
Rounding off the final week of the fringe festival in Nine Elms are the Barbara Hepworth Summer Garden Party hosted by Vauxhall One in the pop-up sculpture park next to the Beaconsfield Gallery in Newport Street from 12pm until 3pm and the Doddington and Rollo Roof Garden Fun Day the following day . Visitors to the estate will be able to see the work done by volunteers to maintain the roof garden and younger festival goers can join a slug and snail hunt, strawberry-picking, face painting, live music and food. For more information visit www.facebook.com/doddingtongarden.
More information about the Chelsea Fringe can be found here.