Pleasure Pier

Carol Laidler, Pat Jamieson, Weymouth Pleasure Pier and The Galleries, Bristol 2012

Pleasure Pier touches on the louche and lusty reputation of a down-at-heel seaside resort, evoking the atmosphere of the disused café at the promontory end of the Pleasure Pier, a place of obsessive fisherman, the occasional tourist, a place where clandestine lovers might come together to be swept away by passion surrounded by the smell of dead fish and the swelling of the sea.

We had been considering notions of documentation, we wanted to make work in the outside world that could be shown simultaneously but in a different form inside an interior space, creating a link between the two. Like a pair of entangled particles, one that effects the other from a distance.

The outside manifestation of Pleasure Pier was a response to a sign on the Pleasure Pier at Waymouth pronouncing that feathering was not allowed on the pier for reasons of safety. What was this act of feathering that the sign referred to? This titillating sign sparked an act of transgression; armed with buckets of paste and posters with the word feather printed on them, we ‘feathered’ one of the alcoves and the bench within it, the thin paper left to peel and dissolve in the salty wind.