(2012), part of Face Value
Plants and Paper:
‘Being Jordan’, Katie Price
‘Beginning Visual Basic 6’, Peter Wright
‘The Italian’s Defiant Mistress’, India Grey
‘The Holy Bible’, various authors
‘Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within’, Byron Brown
‘Night Wings’, Robert Silverberg
‘Mein Kampf’, Adolf Hitler
‘A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume 4: The Great Democracies’, Winston S. Churchill
‘Aggressor’, Andy McNab
‘Tomorrow’s People’, Susan Greenfield
‘A Rose at Midnight’, Sylvie Kurtz
This work seeks to undermine assumptions about the concrete nature of reality. In showing how simply one object can be transformed into another without changing state, we see how function (and not content) dictates identity.
The pertinent aspect of a book is its content: ideas. Ideas are something incorporeal, which we attempt to approximate with language, which is then represented by symbols on the page. When it is used as the fabric of my sculpture, the pertinent attribute of the same object, the characteristic that defines its identity, is completely different; the physical materiality of the paper was irrelevant when it was a book.
Littered throughout this sculpture are pages which, when they formed part of a book, would be of significance to some, whether pernicious (such as Mein Kampf) or sacred (such as The Bible). These pages are no more or less effective as rods and cones than the pages of a Mills & Boon novel or a computer programming textbook.
The utter transformation of an object, whilst it remains materially constant, is something the artist finds profound.
The piece also incorporates plants, all genetic facsimiles of themselves, in paper pots. Visitors were encouraged to choose a plant and take it home, thus benignly dismantling the installation.
