Picture - State - Place

Transposition - Occupied Space 2006

Elements of the ideas behind the construction of the work

Picture
I made a flight to Oman. I was excited by the thought of travelling from Harlech a town steeped in Welsh culture to a country in the Middle East that I had only had second hand experience of. The prospect of imagining taking on a role of a second class tourist Lawrence of Arabia seemed to be appropriate for a time. But this baggage had to be discarded. I didn't want to carry any preconcieved ideas about where I was heading. I made my little space in the plane into a studio. I made drawings and notes of what was going on. I looked at the dot on the map which showed where we were flying over. I came to the conclusion that everyone on the plane was being transported to and from one culture to another. We were on a sort of bridge. I asked the air steward to write 'AIRBRIDGE' in Arabic for me. The Arabic words looked exotic in themselves, even if I hadn't known what they meant. Even so, I had to take the flight steward's word for it. I relaxed and gazed out of the window into a blue continuum. The air-steward came around with a newspaper. She asked me if I wanted to read it. I thanked her again for her translation, and confronted the headlines. Somewhere in the world not far from where I and the rest of my fellow passengers were headed, planes were making a raid on some specific target. There seemed to be a terrible paradox in what was happening in the air. My drawings and thoughts were suddenly SWITCHED the myriad of compositional possibilities to make sculpture suddenly seemed irrelevant.

State
Supression, enclosure, power and kisses.

Place
The question is, "Where is the space we call our place?" The emptiness of our space occupied by another culture.