Fox Training Tower. 2010. Dexion, Fibreglass, Plywood, fixings. Stanley Road, Teddington.

Fox Training Tower. 2010. Dexion, Fibreglass, Plywood. Cube Gallery, Manchester

Fox Training Tower. 2010. Dexion, Fibreglass, Plywood. Stanley Road, Teddington.

Fox Training Tower. 2010. Dexion, Fibreglass, Plywood, fixings. APT Gallery, Deptford.

Fox Training Tower. 2010. Dexion, Fibreglass, Plywood. Stanley Road, Teddington.

Fox Training Tower. 2010. VIDEO

Fox Training Tower. Richard Beard and Nick Ferguson. 2010. Watch a video of a fox climbing the tower here.

Fox Training Tower is an artwork in the series Self Centred Objects, clandestine street furnishings that have been made or imagined for a London neighbourhood. Fox Training Tower responds to the presence of foxes in urban areas. Situated in the front garden of a residential property in Teddington, West London, the work exploits the ability of foxes to climb and their appetite for rubbish by presenting them with waste food at the top of a four meter high tower. Access to the top is via a spiraling ramp way around the outside of the tower. In this way the attempts of foxes to retrieve the rubbish provides night time entertainment from a front room and for passengers on the N281 bus which stops opposite.

The project registers the potential of foxes as shapers of urban space. Responses to foxes have often been limited to combative measures such as the introduction of wheelie bins, the installation of wire mesh around the bases of sheds and, following a suspected fox attack in East London, the advice to close windows at night. These counter measures, however, produce bland city furnishings that achieve little more than establishing an ‘us and them’ dynamic in which citizens feel besieged by nocturnal predators. This project construes the relationship differently. Foxes are taken as an opportunity for new and exciting architectural forms that do not straightforwardly counter foxes but harness their potential. Through a multicoloured tower positioned under a street lamp, the night time antics of foxes are re-presented in terms of how they might benefit citizens by providing engaging urban form and an opportunity to rethink suburban space-time (as comprising multiple, interlaced and colliding rhythms – both human and animal). Meanwhile, in terms of managing the foxes, the excess energy of rebellious fox cubs is channeled into climbing and jumping, so that they might keep themselves off the streets and out of harm’s way.

Aside from the possibilities it offers for watching foxes, our project also tests the potential for public sculpture to gather an audience locally. This is not an aspiration to transform a non-art public into an art public but an attempt to bring interested people out of the woodwork in a part of London where encounter with artwork is otherwise a private and isolated affair, experienced predominantly through the television, Internet or subscription, journals.

Finally, we attempt through this work to develop a model for how art might be thought of from the point of view of its creator. Installed as it is in a private garden, and undertaken without commission, the work undertakes a kind of self representation or self commissioning. One advantage of this is that it does not have to negotiate the apparatus of government: commissioners, art consultants, planning authorities, public consultations or museums to represent the concerns of the artist. But, perhaps more significantly, this model enables a more frank presentation of the interests of the artist in society. Thus, rather than think about what the work is like to look at and experience as a spectator i.e. its aesthetics, we openly posit the question: what is it like to make an artwork and what do I get from making it?

NF

For a link to the BBC documentary Fox Wars click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzwL9taEaOk