Virus is a site-specific piece for Artist of the Day 2018 at Flowers Gallery.
The work coiled from the window space, to the opposite side of the gallery. Beginning in the window as polished mild steel, it became less and less clean until rusted.
Photograms recording the mutating status of the sculpture’s shadows appeared at intervals and we used Flowers lighting to align shadows and photograms. The work’s separate parts were bolted together on site. We wanted the piece to spread like a virus, re-defining Flowers’ space and forcing the viewer to make new journeys within it. This text accompanied the show:
Virus begins or ends with a large and heavy force that sits above its own shadow, knowing that it will spread. It does so because inside there is a virus that replicates, multiplies and reproduces. It could keep going endlessly until it invades all of space.
Yet this virus does not wish to corrupt or destruct. Sometimes it causes pain. Like rust in an eye. Fix in a cut. Weld on a toe. But its urge is to exist so as to find its own mode of being.
It mutates as it evolves. At first or at last it is rusty, made out of steel that for years, in other forms, lay around. Then darker, less consumed by time, it continues and a brighter stage is reached by a grinding disc that removes a layer.
The virus was made for this space. Here it fits. Section to section, nut to bolt, it cuts through and delineates, whilst also attempting to open and expand. The virus has contradictions. Weight that sits on glass. Time of cuts and welds, shadowing split second light shining above photographic paper. Sculpture and photography. One as the witness of the other. Space invading surface. Surface revealing inner space. Oval and Flame. Oval Shadow and Flame Shadow. Shapes repeating themselves, pursuing what happens through making.
The virus knows how it grasped life. Heat of the weld. Light above steel. Drying dripping print. Born through different spaces, it is a multiplicity that craves for more. The virus could spread further and it will, yet today it stands still. It crystallises so that it can be observed. It and its forms. Space. Light. Time. Steel. Photogram. Weld.
Only a whole made out of differences can function. Steel, both fluid and solid. Photographic paper hidden in dark until offered to light. Being and not being. Something existing in the in-between.
