Mantelpiece is a collaborative and participatory public art project commissioned by Domain, a new residential development in Reading.
Displayed in a room without walls, the piece examines what it means to call a house a home through the playful reimagining of discarded suburban objects: the lost buttons, empty pens, broken spectacles that drift into the corners of our living space; filling the jam jar by the telephone, the junk drawer in the kitchen…
A large collection of these fragments – donated by local shops, found while litter picking and given by people in the west Reading area – have been amassed and woven together into an imaginary landscape, set above a mantelpiece in a room without walls.
Members of the public are invited to contemplate the work sitting in an armchair, carved from a solid piece of oak, evoking the quiet time we spend in contemplation before the fire, watching tv or looking out upon the world from a window.