Phone box, foam, calico , screenprint

(Watch video @BBC News, 0:44 sec - 1:00 min)

AN ART PIECE PRODUCED IN COLLABORATION WITH AUTHOR MARK CRICK, FOR THE BT ART BOX PROJECT.

To celebrate 25 years of Childline, a number of artists were commissioned to create a new take on the Gilbert Scott phone box.

GILBERT CRICK CELLPHONE
Harlow’s seminal studies on childhood development (1957-1963) offered infant monkeys the choice of two mothers – one for feeding (made of wire, with feeding nipple) and one for comfort (soft and padded, with no feeding nipple). The infant monkeys would spend an overwhelming majority of time on the second, comforting mother, evidencing that contact comfort is a more powerful force in development than basic nutrition.

After reflecting on the role of the telephone box as a refuge for children via Childline, the concept for the phone box comprises of padding the box as an inverted padded cell. The tactile padding of the box invites the viewer to touch and hug its soft, safe and secure exterior. Instead of being imprisoned by the trauma, the viewer can reflect on past traumas.

Childhood itself can be like a padded cell, safe, soft and cocooning, a protection from harm, for others it is smothering, isolating and prison like. Many of us as adults spend the majority of our lives trying to confront and heal from relative levels of abuse.

In a padded cell, you are contained for your own protection, as a shelter from the outside world, to help your recuperation back from “madness”. The padded cell represents the climax of illness by inverting the padded cell it suggest a stage of recuperation and reflection on traumas past.