Image: A collection of plasticine sculptures that
represent the scale of the hearts of common mammals from Glen Nevis and the
surrounding areas. Photographs courtesy the artist.
In my artistic practice, I attempt to create
projects that place the human within a larger system, for example, that of the animal
kingdom in my current and ongoing project, The
Beginning of the Plasticine Archive of 5146 Mammal Hearts.
Although endlessly romanticized, hearts, in
their very essence, hold the inevitability of death. Throughout the mammal
kingdom this shared pump of expiry differs little, and stays hidden in a
multitude of chests as the essential life-giver. Thus, I have decided to build a sculptural archive
of the hearts of all the existent mammal species, ranging from Bumblebee Bat
(7mm) to Blue Whale (the size of a small car), along with the sound of their
respective pulses beating. The beats will stretch from 10bpm to 1500bpm (so
fast that it will be inaudible to most grown human ears) and will be heard (or
unheard, in some cases) all at once in a soundscape that will be more akin to
vibration than noise.
My aim is to create an immersive
installation in which the human can place itself on a par with its mammal
relatives, stripped of the intelligent body which consistently conceals its
animal parallels.
This project could be a lifelong endeavor,
and has to be researched so carefully, often finding the data takes more time
than creating my sculptural works. My time at Outlandia enabled me to
concentrate on the artistic, rather than the information-driven, side to my
practice. Overall, I think the thing
I will remember the most about my time at the residency is the impact that the
forest had on my work. I came to Lochaber with an expansive list of the mammals
that live there, the trees that grow there, their dimensions and life
expectancies. However, occupying a space which was at the heart of many a
habitat for these lifeforms caused me to look at them as something other than
data. Data and information are central to my work, and my practice often slips
between different disciplines, calling upon doctors, scientists, and the like. The
proximity to nature made me question how best to represent these lifeforms in
my sculptures, and caused a change in how I had been representing them up to
now.
I had graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in June, and was happy to have a residency lined up for soon after. The project is continuing, will be exhibited on a small scale after my next residency in NSW, Australia, and then will be exhibited in a larger space in Liverpool, UK, in November/December 2016. After that, it will grow and grow.
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