For my professional practice I collaborated with sculpture artist Pauline Bickerton. We agreed to make a piece of work in response to the land space called the Hermitage at Letheringham Lodge.
We looked at other artists who had taken on similar land art projects, although on a far bigger scale, one of them being Jean-Claude and Christo. They erected an 18 foot running fence covering 24.5 miles across the hills of Sonoma and Marin counties in northern California, United States. It was only up for fourteen days and then removed leaving no trace of it.
This gave us the idea of the possibility of making it a performance piece, something that was documented rather than permanent. This was something we had not originally set out to do or really spoken about but from then on it was almost as if the process started to take care of itself
Somehow the idea of a sphere started to materialise and we ended up with two spheres, one small and one large. The outside coating of the sphere was ciment fondue, so it was extremely heavy and organic in its shape.
We started to explore ideas around the Greek Myth of Sisyphus and pushing the sphere up a hill to demonstrate the concept of the meaninglessness of life and how this can only be seen when a person becomes conscious of the absurdity of life.
As Albert Camus explains, it is when Sisyphus makes his way down the hill to his rock to start pushing it up the hill again that he reflects on his punishment and is truly conscious of the hopelessness of his situation, “Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life…” (1975,p.11).
The actual idea of rolling the bigger and the smaller stone towards each other did not materialise until the actual day of filming. The stones became symbols of personal experience, frame of reference and struggles to connect with other human beings on a deeper level. The performance demonstrated the ability to connect but that in reality, these connections are merely fleeting moments before we have to move on to continue our journey alone.
This work was not necessarily about the finished product, it was about the process of connection. The feeling of connecting with someone on a deeper level and the work coming from that place.
As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism:
We find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are (1946)
Link to the film Myth of Sisyphus: https://vimeo.com/166343798
Reference:
Camus, A (1975) The Myth of Sisyphus, London: Penguin Books
Kaufman, W. (ed.) (1989) Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, Meridian Publishing Company. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
