2018: Gyre, TENT Gallery, Edinburgh

“…objects are important not because they are evident and physically constrain or enable but often precisely because we do not ‘see’ them. The less we are aware of them the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and insuring normative behaviour, without being open to challenge.” Materiality, Daniel Miller, Duke University Press, 2005

On May 12th 2018 my installation GYRE was part of Creative Reactions art/science festival which took place at TENT gallery at ECA Evolution house. GYRE is constructed from found marine plastic (PET plastic balloons) that I have recovered over the past 8 years from the same ocean beach on Block Island, Rhode Island in the USA . In that time I have amassed hundreds of these objects wrapped around boulders, accumulated in masses like seaweed.  Tied to our rituals of celebration and commemoration, these objects become malignant when discarded; the dead junk of a consumer society.

GYRE explores how we discard these once important items and the impact of our collective ‘forgetting’ on the environment. In the context of GYRE  they are ‘seen’ again, revealing a process of disconnection.  As a reaction to these found objects I have also created new objects, tracings of the balloons on small gessoed boards – postcards that commemorate our collective amnesia

GYRE is also about our emotional connection to ritual objects; the accumulation, accretion and turbulence of memory in personal terms and the reification of our human selves within these objects.  The less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they determine expectations; setting the scene for our complacency.

“ There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts. So that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.” Alfred North Whiteland, Mathematician

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