“In Tallentire’s assemblage GF3-3, 2018 she juxtaposes two elements, a photograph taken during the building of a youth centre in Calais in January 2016 and materials corresponding to those used in its construction. The apparently informal arrangement of the installation in which sheets of OSB (orientated strand board) are leant against the wall or lie on the floor evokes the precarious condition of the situation (in this instance the plight of refugees and migrants in the Calais Migrant camp). The title of the work is taken from a mark, hand written on the board in the production factory, indicating that three panels are designated for a ground floor storey. The photograph of similar OSB boards lies in the assemblage making an interesting association within the canon of Conceptual art with Victor Burgin’s work from 1967, Photopath. Like this, it produces a tension between image and object, material and depiction, as it extends the spatial, temporal and political dialogue that underpins Tallentire’s work. Accompanying GF3-3 in the exhibition is Shelter Notes, 2016 a publication that Tallentire produced as part of her project Shelter, 2016, in which the construction of the Nissen hut, the archetypal form of basic shelter for the displaced since WW1, was explored in the context of a new humanitarian crisis. Shelter is devised to be shown, ideally, in outside and internal spaces, the materials used for a contemporary equivalent of a Nissen hut’s fabrication are assembled, disassembled, re-assembled and the process filmed. Shelter Notes is a record of the thinking behind the process of the work.”
