Hope on a Rope

I rang Kate today and asked how we should present some of the work we had done for Festival of the mind.   

The project involved working with Professor Kate Pahl  and we made it onto the University website here  I'm quoted as saying that the commision gave me an opportunity to make sculpture again and although I was probably thinking about providing a useful soundbite it was very true, I did get to make things - objects of meaning - sculptural artifacts.

As well as a discussion on the idea of what "Hope and the city" I made Hope soap on a rope and a contraption consisting of a pram, ballot box with the words 'Hope' written on it. 

Both pieces of work were made with a good dose of irony. According to Oscar Wild the lowest form of wit but the highest form of .... I think irony.   Post Brexit and perhaps post Trump both works have grown in both irony and pathos.  In the face of a democracy that asserts itself only through negating itself neither the baby or the ballot box carry much hope for a future much better than the present.

The work happened while Kate was in Venice so I was sort of on my own and it comes at a time when I'm thinking more and more of myself as a sculptor - somewhere in my head I have an idea of a great return.  Probably not a great return, perhaps a stopping at station sculpture in what still feels to me like a fairly new millennium.  I tried it a couple of years ago , when every artist at every event I went to introduced themselves as " A cross platform artist working in different media to realise ideas." or something similar. I thought if I said I was a sculptor people would think I was referring back to a complex history of denial and rediscovery, a tradition working back to the beginning of human time when the first non functional object found it's way to it's improvised plinth.  But the word is laden with weight, people would say -

"In  wood or metal ?"

 or the more enlightened might suggest I was working in the tradition of social sculpture like Joseph Boyes.

 I want to say I'm interested in the stuffness of stuff as this somehow explains why I want to go back.  It's not new materialism or phenomenology or the haptic or any of the new silly words I've learned it's not a return to doing something I could do - like modeling clay, carving wood or imagining something as painted bronze.  It's the thing that first made me want to be an artist as I sat in a department store while my mum looked at Afghan coats, the cold feeling of glass on my tongue as I licked the shop window, the taste of suede as I sneaked between the rows of coats and bit them, the plastic flowers slightly perished on my mums swimming hat, sticking out of her bag. The stuffness of stuff I think thats what sculpture is about .