Gabrielle Hoad

LEAN | 2018 | Objects, actions, conversations and invitations

Made for the Od Arts Festival, LEAN was a series of objects and actions designed to prompt thought and conversation around ideas of rivalry and cooperation. Inspired by a leaning shed in the nearby East Coker woods, Gabrielle Hoad and Megan Calver invited residents and festival visitors, as well as an online audience, to lean on bars, lamp-posts, walls, trees and each other, and to notice the incidental leaning of objects and bodies. Encounters ranged from a gentle conversation about straightening wonky pictures to a raucous improvised skittles competition in a West Coker pub.

Commissioned by Simon Lee Dicker & Bob Gelsthorpe for The Art of Rivalry, Od Arts Festival 2018.

A 12-page artists' publication Visit the show of a rival, which documented further leaning actions, was distributed in 2020.