I have just this moment received a book in the post from the LRB. It is a gift from my partners father and his wife. It couldn’t have come at a better time.
The book is ‘Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will’ by Judith Schalansky published by Penguin 2009.
Aside from my studio work I have another practice going on. Of course the two cross over but they do seem also separate activities. This other work is an engagement with Islands and is informed in part by the locations in which they are installed. The first of these temporary installations took place on a small, sparsely populated island off the west coast of Canada in 2008 where I installed two works on the island’s near inaccessible coastline. The work was funded by the Arts Council and couldn’t have existed without their financial assistance.
A neon text was powered by a small generator and flashed its hopeful message to the few inhabitants and boat crews that passed by and a sculpture built from tent fabric, poles and guy lines was ‘pitched’ on a small outcrop that had been built for past and no doubt future generations of loggers to access the island and load barges with their bounty. The project turned into much more than I had hoped. First it was something of an expedition to get the work to the site and maintain it. Everything was done by canoe or on foot, tides permitting. The works needed regular attention; the generator needed to be refueled twice a day and due to the nature of the works and the environment it was important to check that no harm came to them and most importantly to the local wildlife. It was whilst performing one of these checks at low tide which meant I could do part of the check by foot, that I crossed paths with a black bear. I didn’t hang around but slowly, quietly retraced my steps back to the cabin. Later I was able to return and found that the bear had taken something of an interest in the sculpture and left a beautiful muddy paw print on the inside. The reality is of course that the sculpture was in the way and the bear took the most obvious course of action and simply walked through it.
In 2009 I was invited to be a resident artist on the island of Inishturkbeg off the west coast of Ireland. The requirements were straightforward: to make work in response to the island. It had taken a while to decide what to do and making such decisions before ever visiting the island was problematic. I decided on another sculpture from tent technology which measured 3 meters x 15 meters x 20 meters. The drawings for such a work had been on the table for a while and at first it was not a consideration. Then I read on the islands website the craziest thing – If it was not for the curvature of the Earth one would be able to see America from here. – or words to that affect. I knew what I had to do and set about realizing that sculpture. My reason for doing so was to interrupt this interrupted view. But more came about than expected. The work, for a period of a week changed the island’s position above sea level by 3 meters. The weather made the task of erecting and maintaining the work during this period a battle. The elements finally won, destroying the work and lending it a sense of the ill-fated expedition. I managed to get the thing into a near perfect form for 1 day. this was the day I photographed it and is the image attached to this post.
In both cases the exciting thing is incorporating these histories into the works future manifestations.
But back to the arrival of my new book. As I said earlier, the timing of it’s arrival is perfect as my next venture concerns finding a very small desolate unpopulated island of no more than 200 square meters on which to make a new work.
Fingers crossed.
