PARENT PROFILE: Corinna Dean

FOR AUTHOR AND CURATOR Corinna Dean, 42, [pictured left in her kitchen], family life and modern art aren’t mutually exclusive. Her latest project, Bankside-on-Call, which runs until 4th July 2010 at 7 Chancel Street, London SE1 OUX, is a sonic landscape celebrating the past and present life of this newly regenerated part of London (thanks largely to the Tate Modern).

Corinna lives in a 1970s house in South London with her husband, furniture designer Matthew Hilton, and their son, Lucas, aged 6.

LittleBig: Describe your latest work project in layman terms!

CD: Bankside-on-Call is a response to all the commercial development going on around Bankside as a result of the success of Tate Modern. It is a pop-up parlour which acts as a salon where residents and passers-by can add to a sound recording leaving behind a record of their voices and opinions on the once rundown but much loved neighbourhood. The souvenirs on show are an imaginative response to the area’s grittier details. I have commissioned the textile designer Charlene Mullen to design a beautiful table cloth based on an 18th-century banqueting cloth which she has appropriated with details from a local caff in the area.

LittleBig: What was your route to becoming a curator?

CD: I started off studying History of Design and then architecture, but was as interested in the concepts surrounding design and architecture and about opening up or questioning design, space and architecture that I fell into curating as well as writing several books on design. At the moment I am also carrying out a PhD, which is a collaboration with the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme and the Tate Modern looking at cultural regeneration - what influence the Tate Modern has had on London as a global city and how the locality around the Tate has shifted or changed or been obliterated.

LB: And in a nutshell, what has been the effect?

CD: This much neglected area is now being presented as a Cultural Quarter which is about selling space rather than experiencing space and living in it. This can be an area’s pitfall if it focuses on the marketing and packaging rather than the value of shared experiences… I’ve also looked at the Turbine Hall as a new model for public space, where people interact, picnic, run around and the art is secondary.

LB: What modern art has engaged Lucas so far?

CD: I take him to the Tate Modern a lot. He hated the slides by Carsten Holler, but a friend told me that there is something a little cruel in this artist’s behavior towards children and Lucas came off the slides in tears - too steep too fast. I think he was just 4. Now, he says he loves Charles Jencks earth mound pieces [pictured above - click on the picture for a larger image and caption information]. We visited a new arts centre called Jupiter Artland just outside Edinburgh near where my parents live, and they have commissioned a series of pieces for the grounds of their house, funded by their organic cosmetics company. Lucas was down on the ground imitating the position of the human sculpture by Anthony Gormley, and running around the Jencks’ earth mounds.

LB: Does he understand your Bankside project?

CD: He does ask questions about it and how I am putting it all together. I think it’s semi-child friendly - they might enjoy the sound installation part.

LB: What other great cultural places do you take Lucas to?

CD: Aside from the Tate Modern, the Horniman museum in Forest Hill, south London, although recently he has said that he is more interested in science!

LB: What are your favorite child-centric designs?

CD: Lucas loves the sporadic fountain jets outside the Royal Festival Hall and at Somerset House. Lucas is great at constructing things - for my birthday he made a ring with a dead wasp, which he found underneath my desk - very delicate!

LB: What are your biggest family life design beefs?

CD: Ugly public transport, bendy buses, and a lack of good modern, clean swimming pools.

LB: Are you more conscious of the designs you buy for family life seeing as how you are married to a furniture designer?

CD: We really haven’t bought anything specific for Lucas except a Victorian brass bed from Ebay as my sister grew up in one and I really like the romance of it - very ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’. And I designed a garden shed for Lucas [pictured above - click on the image for a larger picture] rather than buying one off the shelf, and he loves climbing over it and on to the roof. It is clad with black corrugated bitumen roofing material, and a lot of glass so it’s slightly modern.

LB: What are your favourite online resources?

CD: I only shop online for books. At the moment I’m reading Generation X by Douglas Coupland, and the Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett about how the public and private are being blurred. Lucas loves Road Dahl so www.roalddahl.com

LB: What is your child’s room like? Any decorating tips?

CD: Messy! We have some of Matthew’s furniture from Case [the Valentine chest is pictured above] in there but it is not specific for children. We have just hung shelves lower!

*Corinna Dean: 07951 576698

**Bankside-On-Call is part of the London Festival of Architecture.