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Fox Training Tower, Beard and Ferguson 2010.

Fox Training Tower attempts to reverse the experience of being victimised by urban foxes. Situated in the front garden of a residential property in Teddington, West London, the work exploits foxes’ ability to climb and their appetite for rubbish by presenting them with waste food at the top of a three meter tower. Access to the top is via a spiraling ramp way around the outside of the tower. In this way the attempts of foxes to retrieve the rubbish provides night time entertainment for residents and for passengers on the N281 bus which stops opposite.

Our interest in foxes stems from their potential to shape urban spaces. Responses to foxes are for the most part limited to combative measures such as the introduction of wheelie bins, the installation of wire mesh around the bases of sheds and, following a suspected fox attack in East London, the recent advice to close windows at night. These counter measures, however, produce bland city furnishings that achieve little more than establishing an ‘us and them’ dynamic in which citizens feel besieged by nocturnal predators. This project imagines the relationship differently. Foxes are taken as an opportunity for new and exciting architectural forms that do not straightforwardly counter foxes but harness their potential. Through a multicoloured tower positioned under a street lamp, the night time antics of foxes are re-presented in terms of how they might benefit citizens by providing entertainment, education opportunities, and engaging urban form. Meanwhile, in terms of managing the foxes, the excess energy of rebellious fox cubs is channeled into climbing and jumping, keeping them off the streets and out of harm’s way.

Aside from the possibilities it offers for watching foxes, our project also tests the potential for public sculpture to gather an audience locally. This is not an aspiration to transform a non-art public into an art public but an attempt to bring interested people out of the woodwork in a part of London where encounter with artwork is otherwise a private and isolated affair, experienced predominantly through the television, Internet or subscription, journals.

Finally, we see in this work a model for self representation or self commissioning. Because it is installed in a private garden, the work does not have to negotiate the apparatus of government: commissioners, art consultants, planning authorities, public consultations or museums to represent the concerns of the artist. In this way it proposes a way of inserting sculpture directly in the public sphere and at a time when budgets for public art are under scrutiny.

Fox Training Tower will be in use from 19th June until the 4th July. The work may be also viewed by live webcam for the duration of the exhibition through the website www.nickferguson.co.uk

Nick Ferguson June 2010