In the following text, exhibition maker and writer Jo Melvin, and curator Jes Fernie, wrangle with these concepts, moving on to a discussion about touch, destruction-restitution, and the fraught, fantastic possibilities of the archive. This is rhetorical at its most profound. So, I wholeheartedly welcome your rhetorical spanner! In my view, there is an additional element of possibility, agency, energy that is embedded in work sited in the public realm, due to its raw relation to many different publics and the volatile political, social and environmental contexts in which it might exist.
There was some funding, enough to cover costs. What continues to resonate for me is the idea of a hole dug by grave diggers as a monument.
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In other words, the lack of objecthood β and body! Its temporary nature as a hole had, and continues to have, a durational quality, which is in itself multi-layered. In both these paintings, the hole sheers off the surface. It places the viewer into a strangely visceral spatial relationship where we become conscious of uprightness, and inevitability, of disintegration.
The other point I want to make was how people touch things, sculptures, monuments, and how their touching changes the workβ¦. JF: Touch is such an intimate, private act that stands in stark contrast to the exposed, very public nature of so many sculptures and monuments. I think we very quickly learn how to drown out the noise and potential interference of public spaces we inhabit in order to create a protective atmosphere of our own in which we can express unsaid and unsayable things. This is most evident, of course, in religious settings and the ways that worshipers touch the feet of saints while praying, and in doing so, create a golden, worn patina that speaks of centuries of prayer and attention.
It received so much love in the form of lipstick-covered kisses from adoring fans that the sandstone began to erode and a glass barrier had to be installed to protect it, which of course, is now also covered in kisses. Destruction through love! I often wonder at what point people would stop kissing the glass; how many barriers is too many barriers to express your love?
