Nine, Eleven
Whatever the debate regarding American Foreign Policy and Corporate Capitalism, the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Cenre - as design objects and feats of engineering - were, truly, awesome. One could stand on the rooftop, on a dead calm day and watch the helicopters buzzing and the swimming pools glistening below. One could gaze across the Hudson or back up over Manhattan and marvel. Truly, it was like being at the top of the world.Nine, Eleven

Gavin Weston
September 2002
Gavin Weston is a multi-media artist, writer and curator who lives on the Ards Peninsula and works in Belfast. He studied Fine Art at Saint Martin's School of Art and Design and Goldsmiths' College, London, and subsequently worked and taught in West Africa. In 1995 he completed an MA at The University of Ulster, where he has recently been teaching. He is also an associate lecturer at Belfast Institute and a regular contributor to The Sunday Times. He is a former prize-winner of The Claremorris Open and Iontas, and was nominated for The Becks Futures Award in 2000.Weston's recent work includes a floating red brick house () for The Ards Sculpture Trail, sculpture gardens for The Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, for Musgrave Park Hospital and for Quaker Cottage, Belfast, and designs for Blackpool's and the public art project He has exhibited recently at The Grundy Gallery, Blackpool, at the London galleries Hales and APT, Plymouth's Studio 39, The Ormeau Baths Gallery and The Engine Room Gallery, Belfast, The Gallery of Photography, Dublin, and at New York's Bingo Hall Gallery. During 2000 Weston collaborated with Irish poet Conor O'Callaghan on the publication , in the U.S.A. He also recently worked - with artist Bronagh Wright and deaf children from Jordanstown School - on the project Ssshhh, for The Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast. At the same venue, for this year's Belfast Festival, Weston curated and exhibited in the critically acclaimed .Currently Weston is writing and illustrating a children's book and is working towards exhibitions in Limerick, Belfast, Cork and Plymouth. He has just completed work on a new sculpture commission () for the coastal village of Ballyhalbert and was recently awarded a major commission () by The Upper Springfield Development Trust, in West Belfast. Weston has also been selected to create a large-scale, temporary public artwork, as part of Belfast's bid to be in 2008.