Forecast – New work @ Green: Eastside Culture Crawl preview exhibition.
Very pleased to have a work exhibited as part of the Eastside Culture Crawl’s preview exhibition series. The theme was “green’ and the piece, called Forecast, which was started during Covid Lockdown, has up until now, never been shown. The piece seems as darkly relevant now as when I started building it… Many thanks to everyone who came out for a look and for all your thoughtful feedback! Here’s a little background info on some of the ideas I brought to the work:
Forecast- a brief description
Forecast is a text-based, sculptural assemblage composed of ready-made, upcycled and repurposed materials, standing approximately6 feet high and 3 feet in circumference. It is meant to be viewed in the round, i.e., read from all four directions. Fashioned entirely from a natural material, bamboo, Forecast incorporates a discarded piece of furniture with hand-built text, homemade wicker panels, bundled dried canes, and a slender new shoot, to achieve the appearance of a somewhat bespoke beacon. In keeping with the Crawl’s Preview Exhibition theme of “Green”, the piece may be considered a climate change signpost, a device for self-directed divination, portentous, ominous even in its prognostic possibilities.
Depending upon the order and direction of approach, individual text phrases may be interpreted by the viewer to reveal or inspire an overall message, one which alternately suggests: IT WILL GET WORSE BEFORE IT IS GOING TO GET BETTER, or IT IS GOING TO GET BETTER BEFORE IT WILL GET WORSE, or BEFORE IT IS GOING TO GET BETTER IT WILL GET WORSE, or BEFORE IT WILL…?
Cryptically fun fact: most bamboo is monocarpic: flowering, fruiting and dying en masse, often initiating extreme ecological consequences with animal infestations and disease outbreaks due to fruiting and famine, deforestation and land erosion occurring in the resultant die-off. But on a more auspicious note, Forecast is also evocative of individual attempts to change one’s own fate and take part in altering the outlook of our current progress; saying no to the mass-produced waste inherent in late-stage capitalism and perhaps, yes to the future prospect of a post-scarcity world where our resources, attitudes and efforts are focussed on developing more equitable and sustainable ways of being in the world.
