Lawrence Weiner's installation at Frome's former silk mill

Intervention/Decoration, Friday May 9 until June 21, Various venues, Frome.

Foreground, Frome's newest arts organisation, is launching its inaugural exhibition, Intervention/Decoration, on Friday.

Running until June 21, Intervention/Decoration will interact with the fabric of the historic country town of Frome and sees seven internationally renowned and emerging artists creating commissions for the town.

Curated and produced by husband and wife team Tabitha Clayson and Simon Morrissey, Intervention/Decoration makes use of both interior sites and outdoor spaces, making it one of the most ambitious contemporary art events staged in the region in recent years.

A former silk mill, boarded-up windows and the local toyshop will become temporary homes to sculpture, installations and patterns, as the artists use decoration and intervention to create art that is part of everyday surroundings.

In a major coup for Frome and the region, leading international artists from the US, Britain and Germany will be taking part.

These include British artist Richard Woods, who will transform transform the interior of the listed 18th Century non-conformist chapel with a riotous false floor of clashing coloured cartoon floorboards.

Turner Prize nominee Cornelia Parker will be making a new work that draws both on Frome's tradition of non-conformist worship and uses local craftsmen to create it.

US artist Lawrence Weiner concentrates on using language as his only material and in Frome, his work will consist of a simple but imposing text painted directly onto the stone walls of the town's former silk mill.

Eva Berendes, one of Germany's most exciting emerging artists, has drawn on the history of abstraction in art and design, from Art Deco designs to Russian Constructivist painting, to create a massive curtain which will also be located at the former silk mill and transform the newly renovated Weaving Shed.

Ellenbray toyshop will provide an unusual but perfect backdrop for rising star Michael Dean's mysterious sculpture garden of black balloons, folded metal, concrete and sticks.

Renowned American artist Jim Isermann will radically transform a common eyesore in the town by using 1950s textiles patterns produced by Frome's fabric mills as the inspiration for a poster that will then be wallpapered onto boarded-up windows.

Finally, Ruth Ewan will use Frome's own town crier to reinsert politics into the day-to-day workings of the town by having the crier proclaim poems by Gustav Spiller, a leading figure in the early 20th Century ethical movement in Britain.

To volunteeer as an exhibition guide or to help the artists install the work, email getinvolved@foregroundprojects.org.uk or call (01373) 888187.

3:48pm Wednesday 7th May 2008

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