Forerunner Misplaced Concreteness (2017-ongoing), Grizedale Arts, UK, curated by Adam Sutherland. Image: the artist.

After our exhibition Brute Clues in Project Arts Centre in 2016, we were initially approached by Grizedale Arts about our use of concrete as a building material. Grizedale Arts has a heavily Arte Util background. The organisation functions on the basis that artworks and use value, or functionalism aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Often using a notional ‘real world’ scenario artworks are probed and tested to see where they might fit in with everyday life or engage people more effectively. To this effect we were offered the chance to build or to some extent attempt to rebuild Brute Clues, specifically the concrete Dam shape on a hillside in Coniston. Transferring an artwork that played so heavily on the ‘temporality’ of its material and short span of existence brought with it its own challenges and the work will sit on the hillside for likely over 100 years before the materials used start to break down. Contrasting this with the two months that the same material spent in a gallery space and our title of Misplaced Concreteness becomes slowly apparent. The title refers to a process called reification or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where an abstract or idea is deemed to be a reality, when a hypothetical concept is thought to be a ‘concrete’ thing. The power of the exhibition Brute Clues was its apparent concreteness, the visual effect of a long duration of time that marked the material and when moved to a hillside this timescale is dwarfed by the geological timescale it is surrounded by.