Completed Sculpture: 'This S(c)eptic Isle': 'Sentinel 1 (Your Order From)'

All Images:  'Sentinel 1 (Your Order From)', Salvaged Cardboard Boxes & Tube, MDF,
Adhesive Tape, Paper Collage, Acrylics & French Polish, 145 cm X 65 cm X 60 cm, 2018

As mentioned in my last post, I've been completing sculptures at a fairly rapid rate, over the last three or four weeks.  This is, admittedly, after a much longer period of slog, prepping and painting broken toys, and building a seemingly endless procession of MDF carcasses to reinforce the cardboard cartons I’d collected.

It’s lovely to reach that stage where it’s all about assembling and finishing - and another piece seems to reach completion every few days.  With painting, I’ve always noted how the most enjoyable part of the whole process comes about two thirds or three quarters of the way through - when the thing’s still up for grabs, but most of the problematic bridges have been crossed.  At that stage, you often have a pretty clear sense of whether or not a piece will be successful on its own terms - and it’s possible to take pleasure in bringing it to some form of conclusion.  Although it's been a slightly more methodical process, I currently seem to be enjoying the sculptural equivalent of that situation.  Ironically, the actual completion can often feel a bit anti-climactic in comparison – but just now, that feeling is offset by the focus a deadline brings - and the by fact that, as each piece is finished, there’s another waiting in the queue, immediately behind.

Anyway, alongside the ‘Childish Things’ series of abandoned toy sculptures, I’ve also been working on a parallel series of what I’ve chosen to entitle ‘Sentinels’ - of which this is the first.  Whereas cardboard boxes form an important, if subsidiary element of the ‘Childish Things’, here they are the main event.  The boxes clearly relate to another common feature of the fly-tipped garbage that continues to spill across the pavements of my local neighbourhood, and form one of the oft-mentioned recurring ‘key motifs’ of my ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’ project.  It’s not too great an imaginative stretch to associate them with the on-demand, consumer lifestyles we all now lead.  Even in a fairly low-rent area like ours, most days see a fairly constant parade of white courier vans, unloading the latest online purchases.  The cardboard packaging normally re-emerges, to reside beside front doors, or amongst the bins, not long afterwards.

My alighting upon the monolithic, columnar form of ‘Sentinel 1 (Your Order From)’ was one of those fairly organic, intuitive things that just felt right almost as soon as I started playing with the boxes.  I’d originally thought in terms of more random accumulations, but it seems that the vertical format was pretty close to the surface of my subconscious and felt like an itch I just needed to scratch.  There’s also a direct link with the discarded refrigerators, which certainly rival cardboard cartons for the title of most prolific street trash item on a good week.  Indeed, the idea of sentinels probably occurred in my mind in connection with the fridges, even before I started stacking boxes.  However, I’d already paid heed to them in my pre-existing fridge door wall pieces, and so the boxes won out this time round.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out, at this point – that these particular boxes are somewhat removed from their raw state.  Just as with the toy sculptures, the intention here was to create a sculptural artifact - rather than a pure Readymade.  Not only does each of the boxes contain a rigid inner structure - the surfaces have also been extensively modulated and ‘tidied up’ through the application of acrylic paint, French polish, packing tape and numerous litres of PVA. 

Naturally, as the title suggests, it’s pretty difficult to imagine a simple monolith form, particularly at this kind of scale - without perceiving in it, the human figure.  That’s one of the archetypes of sculpture, from prehistory to the present day, of course, and speaks of our inbuilt tendency towards an anthropomorphic gestalt - regardless of the degree of apparent abstraction at play.  I’ve rarely thought of the figure as my subject, and it certainly wasn’t my first intention when I began the ’TSI’ work, last year.  Nevertheless, there’s no point pretending it isn’t an undeniable association in these ‘Sentinel’ pieces, and I guess there is something pleasing about the idea of figures (or lives) constructed solely from the containers of consumable product.

The other important inescapable feature of this sculpture is its function as a carrier of text.  As with the textual content in the associated ‘Fridge’ series, the phrases stenciled onto ‘Sentinel 1’ are excerpts from my long-form piece, ‘BelowThe Line / Beneath Contempt’.  Although that is an extended text, with the conceit of a five-act structure, any narrative arc(s) it may hint at, is really little more than a happy accident - brought about by the juxtaposition of numerous Brexit-related, ‘Below the Line’ comments.  In fact, it’s really just an exercise in collaging, and thereby recontextualising found material.  This repeated recycling of and calling-back to, of both texts and motifs, seems to have become an increasing feature of my work in recent years.

In the light of that, extracting, and further reframing certain of its components for inclusion in the ‘Fridges’ and ‘Sentinels’, feels perfectly appropriate.  In fact, if these cardboard columns are to be read as figures - then perhaps the application of text onto them feels like an exercise in giving them a voice.  Sadly, as recent British history demonstrates, when a poorly educated populace of alienated consumers is presented with a stark, binary choice - and encouraged to express an uninformed (or misinformed) opinion, ‘the voice of the people’ may not be what one would hope to hear at all.  Democracy, eh?  What a palaver!

In this case, the two chosen phrases, ‘Bizzarre logic’ and ‘You’ve been given plenty- don’t pretend’, come from entirely separate sections of both the compiled ‘BTL/BC’ text, and the original debate that seeded it.  As ever, a cut and paste approach opens up the potential for further interpretation, or indeed – a whole new argument.  And, whilst I do know the correct spelling of 'Bizarre' - the combative on-line contributor, sadly, did not.