Coleman Project Space

As a part of REAP, for Today’s the Day, I asked 72 people to be custodians of a teddy, for a year to be returned at the end of the year with an image of where they had been and possible physical clues of their year-long sojourn. I posted them off to far- away places or they were collected at a private view at Café Gallery Projects. The identical and pristine teddy bears were placed in extraordinarily diverse locations throughout the world including the insect house at London Zoo, on top of a mountain in the Pyrenees, in a nuclear bunker at Porton Down, undergoing a petrification process at Karlovy Vary hot springs, Western Bohemia, between the tide marks in the Thames, buried in Southwark Park, inside a chimney, on top of the tallest tree in Kew  Gardens, going continuously around on a turbine wheel generating electricity from an Irish mountain stream, in a sacred Aboriginal cave in Australia, with the head gardener in Great Dixter gardens, in a sacred Maori cave, in a remote Scottish Benedictine monastery, in the Tate archives,  on a private island in the Venetian lagoon, outside a chateau in France, in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Australia,on a Moroccan rooftop, the alter-ego of an artist, in a Zambian school, with a squirrel colony in Bangalore, iced up and sunburnt in New England, with Olly the dog, under a North Sea oil rig, a mummification by an Egyptologist, in every wash of a washing machine, accompanying a woman constantly throughout her year of cancer treatment, with a rabbit, in a local nursery school, on the alter of the Buddhist monk who built the Peace Pagoda in Battersea, as a figurehead on a boat  and inside a bird box where a bird built a nest in its lap and fledglings hatched out. They returned to Southwark one year later bearing the evidence of their journeys, physical or metaphysical, and were exhibited at Coleman Project Space opened with a blessing by Rev. Nagase, the Buddhist monk and an Elvis impersonator singing “Teddy Bear”