Ego (non)
installation, driftwood, plaster
gold leaf, silver leaf, bronze leaf
ego: maintain and enhance favourable views of oneself; inflated idea of ones importance.
monumental: having the quality of being larger than life, heroic scale, imposing, exceptionally great, of quality, enduring significance.
The pursuit of the monumental has become a modern day ritual where the ego supersedes the environment and humanity. Bound by rules and expectations I see contemporary society as authoritarian and prescriptive. It is this philosophy I consistently resist. This work demands an unpretentious simplicity and a delicate fragility. My studio practice requires repetition and order. It is about arrangement, how objects and ecosystems inter-relate. In magnetising to these specific materials I question their histories and value. I make a claim, establishing intrigue about the material and question the ideas of collection and the obsessions which manifest during this process. The work wavers between the monumental and the un-monumental. When things are arranged in a particular way it prompts the viewer to look more closely to better scrutinise. In rearranging the discarded we turn the discarded into the monumental. I question truth, truth as personification, and the pretence of image. In a society where individuals prostitute truth for the new, a time of transition, of liminal space, a re-assimilation in which value for truth overrides the need for the new. To make something out of nothing, to make nothing out of something, to make with no end in site.
"arrange whatever pieces come your way",
Virginia Wolf.