Oderbolz has developed a new work for Bermondsey Square’s temporary public sculpture commission SCULPTURE AT. The work draws from the various uses the square has during the week: as a place of transit; a place where residents and people working in the area sit; and as the site of a weekly antiques market. Considering these uses and the reflection on our needs and expectations from the environment, Oderbolz builds a structure in the form of a house.

It is an archetypical house, a very rough shape like a kids drawing, and the sculpture mingles between a 3-dimensional form and a drawing. On top of this form, one half of its roof is covered by a solid metal shelter and the other side a soft curtain hangs, creating a more intimate and private aspect. With these two elements, a situation is created that raises questions around our expectations of a shelter or house in our urban environment.

Exploring relationships between: privacy and the public; cover and protection; shelter and safety; internal and external; Oderbolz’s sculpture is a minimal gesture, stripped down to the bare relevant elements. Almost brutally, it leaves space to the imagination and interpretation of the passing viewer or ‘shelterer’.

In her sculptures, spatial drawings and objects, Oderbolz reflects on how architectures and their inhabited structures are always part of a larger political and economic context. While utopias and powerful rhetoric can express and reveal themselves through architecture, it is only in everyday life and the lived experience that boundaries and spaces between the self and the other, between the individual and the community, can be de ned and thus become tangible