Art by Clara Lupino
As artists we choose to notice everything. We understand that there are signs and symbols in everything visual and we set ourselves the task of creating artwork that contains what we believe are important questions. Everything has great meaning. Nothing is meaningless. If we begin to accept that everything happens for a reason and that we are all inter-connected, we can then start to make things happen for specific reasons.
Installations:
The Birth
For over a decade within my contemporary art practise, I had been working on the conceptualisation of the ultimate sculpture; an accessible art piece that would be understandable by everyone and that would have the potential to focus the world's attention upon the universal creative force.
I believe that the potential to make a great work of Art is within everyone. Yet people are forgetting that they are all artists, channelling concepts and bringing life into being.
"Fortress"
site-specific installation, Nottingham General Hospital
The site for this installation is the arc of a circular room at the top of a tower; a disused wing of a hospital, opened in 1901. The architectural influence, with its turreted roof, references the building's proximity to Nottingham Castle. Having previously made several nest-like structures, from moorland materials, I transposed the concept of Protection into this installation.
I hung seven barricades in front of seven windows to arrest their function and shift the focus from exterior to interior. The barricades have shapes cut through them, like arrow-slits in castle battlements.
Each barricade was made from a different material, representing personal preservation. Steel, straw, heather, grass, dust sheet, insulation felt and leather from the clog factory in Hebden Bridge. The window frames have been coated in Red-Oxide primer, another act of preservation.
Poles, which once supported the curtain-rails around the patients' beds were also coated in Red-Oxide. I suspended masks from the poles, made from the same materials as each barricade. Certain masks were created 'blind', whilst others had apertures and could be focused through the arrow-slits to other windows in other buildings.
I took the spherical glass light-shades from the ceiling and hung them from another arc of poles, suspending them as pendulums, close to the floor. The pendulums are reminiscent of demolition balls.
I staked out a white handkerchief with four iron nails underneath each pendulum, not as a surrender but as an insurance and a reference to trust, as blankets used by rescue teams to catch people who are falling from high buildings.
I also printed text onto white handkerchiefs which were then slotted into the vacant placards which once displayed the names of each patient. These new placards made reference to the positions of a handkerchief being dropped to commence a jousting tournament :
is pulled from the breast
is held in the air
is released from the fingerss
falls to the ground
vibrates with the charge
is trampled upon
is bloody
is retrieved and presented
is staked out
