SITTING Pretty is a new project by Design Exhibition Scotland to showcase ambitious new park bench designs as part of a temporary exhibition at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute.
Running from July 9 until October 15, five new benches have been created by Scotland-based designers.
This project complements Mount Stuart’s long tradition of commissioning site-specific installations.
Through an open call that received over 60 submissions, Design Exhibition Scotland prompted Scottish designers to produce original benches for Mount Stuart reflecting on the potential of these objects to connect people to nature, offering the luxury of calmness and stillness in an ever-changing and fast-paced world.
Park benches are used to explore alternative lifestyles focused on wellbeing and community values as the design structures ground users in the natural landscape encouraging reflections on human relations.
Four design teams were selected to create four outdoor benches; while as part of a separate commission artist and designer James Rigler has designed a new indoor bench for the interior of Mount Stuart House.
The selection panel for the open call was Sophie Crichton Stuart, chair of Mount Stuart Trust; Sophie McKinlay, director of programme, V&A Dundee; artist and designer, James Rigler and Susanna Beaumont, director, Design Exhibition Scotland.
Together they looked for designs that celebrate all that the public bench offers: the joy of sitting outside, the great outdoors and public space; the chance to pause for thought, take in a view, read a book and eat a sandwich or a place to meet with friends.
And of course, that the park bench should celebrate good design and well-crafted materials.
Beaumont said: “There’s something so generous about a bench. Benches offer the possibility that somebody can sit next to you creating a kind of hospitality of the outdoors. A bench is a piece of sculpture and then you sit on it and it’s a functional object.
“I hope the selected benches can act as prototypes to be replicated and to populate urban and natural spaces in Scotland creating further opportunities for the emerging designers involved.”
