Distorted Realities
One of my first exploratory artworks was a performative film presented alongside clay sculpture, to form an installation where the concept was to explore my subjective relationship with a river that I experienced during a group art residency in a forest in Ayrshire, Scotland. This exploration began on the first day camping beside a forest, when I became fascinated by the rotating movement of a white foam disc with beautifully sorted organic materials in the eddy of a waterfall. As I observed the rotating disk, I noticed it had a secondary movement in relationship to the downward flow of the river where the foam disc circulated in an oval pattern moving downstream when the disc was near the main flow of the river, and then at a certain point it rotated upstream as it shifted further into the eddy away from the main river flow. As it rotated, it gathered twigs and dried pine needles from the water, which became sorted neatly in the middle of the foam, to form almost the yolk of a fried egg.
During the night it had rained heavily and the following morning when I went to gaze upon the foam/debris disc, it was rotating no more, but instead it lay stationary on the edge of the eddy and rock bank. It had lost its smooth central ‘yolk’ and had become rather ragged in appearance where large twigs and branches poked out of the remaining white foam. At this moment I decided to ‘aid’ the disc back into action with the elemental agency of the river. A friend filmed me using my rather rudimentary point and shoot digital camera, as I waded into the water and took my time pulling out large branches from the foam and coaxing the foam back into circulation of the river. It took time, as I could easily have destroyed the foam disc by making the wrong movement, but eventually it limped back into action.
I later made an air-dried clay sculpture of the foam/debris disc. Unlike foam, sticks and other organic material (all materials of the river), I decided to use my own artistic material - air-dried clay. It was my own human response in acknowledgement of the river’s autogenic activity.
The completed artwork ‘Distorted Realities’, 2018 was shown in a group show called “Standstill” at Crownpoint Studios, in Glasgow in December 2018.
