Our Cosmic Burden - Plinth pair

Photo: Matt Page.

Some parts of Our Cosmic Burden have been made with pairs in mind. Its just the way that things work out sometimes with ideas. It seems easier to work on more than one piece at a time and for some reason one starts influencing the other so you find yourself trying to balance them out. A sort of conceptual interdependancy. Its not like they cant ever be seperated though. They are like the other figures in the piece. They could be viewed together or seperately. Its kind of nice to think of sculptural pieces being independant and having a character of their own. Their relationship to other pieces then becomes a developing thing within itself.

Our Cosmic Burden

This is possibly the first photo that I have of them all together. There are 16 of them and they can be exhibited in any format really but normally I didn't envisage them so crowded together. Pushing them together though makes it look like a protest meeting which is rather nice.

Had a photo session a couple of weeks ago with Matt Page taking the photos in a studio session so will be posting a variety of them over the next few weeks.

Samuel L Jackson A Cat creeps.

Its just the way that it happens really. Spaand time seem interchangeable.

Woman carrying Cats Creep

Dissolving stairway being recreated and carried by a woman. We all have our burdens.

Hungarian lady

Rather like someone arriving with a whole load of presents. Maybe just a way of exploring the way that we move through space.

barier 2

Its like the world taking control or possibly the other way round.

Our cosmic burden (Betty Boop)

This is part of the 16 piece sculpture Our Cosmic Burden. It can be exhibited in a variable way but usually in a variation on a grid formation. Sometimes on plinths but sometimes on the floor.

Crash Barier

I lusted after a photographic scene when there was a lot of road works near my studio. Just about got it together to photo which was lucky because it all disapeared just after I took the photos. Slicing them up has acted as a way of structuring the sculpture.

Phoenix Brighton Open

Photos of Exhibition at Phoenix Brighton Open Studios

                                           Our Cosmic Burden

                                            Landscape Walking Location shot

landscape walking

I am in the process of making a large scale version of this one that I will be taking back into the landscape and walking with it.

Little Boy Blue (riot)

This is one that might be translated into a carrying piece. Maybe walk through Clapham, where the pictures were taken, carrying the sculpture.

"The great fires were now lit on the other side of the ocean. It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around 18th century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilisation has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn.

ring a ring

Starting to maybe plan a large scale sculpture involving hundreds of little figures crowding across a floor all carrying their own little burden.