bontecou pavilion
“My immediate association with Lee Bontecou’s sculptures and drawings was the kind of speculative, temporary architecture you see at world expos, like the 1951 Festival of Britain. I was thinking about masts, tensile structures and suspended orbs – pavilions showcasing ‘the modern’. With this in mind, I set about kit-bashing an architectural maquette: a globe cast in plaster from a mould derived from the top of a 2 litre water bottle; cork balls, bendy jeweller’s pins, a cork placemat and some silver thread.
With the maquette made (but with no thought given to the scale), I wanted to include some people, but the ones I have were too big. I wondered if this was a reasonable use-case for generative AI, so I uploaded one of my photographs and prompted for the inclusion of some architectural modeller’s figures. I asked that the figures should look like the mass-produced ones, so as wobbly in places. The results of that prompt are below. The maquette itself is unchanged.
I’d always imagined my ‘Bontecou Pavilion’ to be an illuminated structure; it has this celestial feeling, so I experimented again to see if I could prompt for my architectural model to be illuminated as an architectural model would be illuminated, so with LEDs etc (the stem-like structures topped with lights, and the orbs lit from within like moons). Hand-on-heart, the ability to art direct these maquette photos ‘post-shoot’ was exciting.” July 2026
