Must a sculptural invention be real or not???
The question I’m forced to consider is how can one enhance the beauty of nature? Does creating a physical sculpture make a positive or negative statement? If a thing exists in reality, it’s tangible, touchable, and available to immerse oneself in but practicalities place many sculptures out-of-bounds, too precious, easily damaged, or dangerous to be touched.
This makes me ask myself if it’s necessary to construct the real object or if this stage can sometimes be discarded?
My ‘Installations that never were’ were born out of the frustration of submitting proposals which are rejected, never to see the light of day. But I now see they offer a way forward where work is produced as a subtle, light touch, virtual composition rather than a truthful, more physically forceful experience. This changes the outcome but in what feels like a positive way for the issues I’m currently thinking about. My cynical side asks how much of life truthfully takes place in the real anyway rather than in some kind of mediated fantasy. From this perspective, the approach simply shifts the results more firmly and obviously into the realm of fiction.
I’m not saying the scaffold pieces should never be made but they would communicate something very different and are perhaps for another time and place.
Here’s my final proposal for Riverhill, not in its final form or method of execution but a work in progress maquette. It will exist as an online digital image, a physical collage, and as a free postcard hand out. The digital offering is accessed by triggering a QR (Quick Response) code with one’s phone, causing my virtual image to appear so the spectator can compare it with the natural reality of the real location before them.
