Photographic & Video installation 2005
“There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the gruelling erosion of natural force. Flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forms bob, gasping for life”.
– Paglia, Sexual Personae
There are a Series of 8 pillars from installation Pillars from 2007. Pillars are Lambdachrome prints, 268cm in height and 50cm wide are attached to ‘Round-a-Form’ pillars.
There is also a Projected DVD video titled White Knuckle Ride, which is also included in the Clay 2008 section of this website. The Video travels around several construction site hoarding and is accompanied by the sound track of a fun fair. Each ride is 4 minute duration, slows down and starts again.
‘White Knuckle Ride’ • projected DVD • 14:39
The video travels around several construction-site hoarding and is accompanied by the sound track of a fun fair. Each ride is four minutes in duration, slows down and starts again.
For Pillars I recorded the final stages of the construction process – just prior to the completion date – of large building projects. A concentrated mass, energy and force underlie the smooth finished edifice. Recapturing the essence of this activity through sound, photography, video and sculpture is an attempt to further reshuffle apparently chaotic material.
Graffiti as a cultural phenomenon is common to every literate society. It can be seen as a concrete manifestation of personal and communal ideologies which are visually striking, insistent and provocative. These clandestine messages are an illegitimate counterpart to the paid-for marketing advertisements on billboards, hoardings and signs which adorn the perimeter of most construction sites. One form of communication can be seen to endorse and play upon normative expectations, the other, reveals an underlying opposite which disregards social convention. In port-a-loos and on building sites I found the graffiti both prolific and similar in each location. As an underlying language it has a potency and urgency which is synonymous with the internal building process itself. I include it therefore in the fabric of the installation.
Pillars 1 is a photographic, sound, video and sculptural installation. Two previous bodies of work, Asylum (2005) and The Landing (2003), are concerned with how the human instinctively strives to recreate a personal space in even the most extreme environments. Pillars 1 starts with the building industry itself and the large-scale momentum of the process of building. The nature and core of this energy surge are the building blocks, and the place of exploration for this body of work.