“MONSTER” (3D Installation, Performance, 2015)

-A series of performances and happenings-

 

Monster is a piece of work that I created from a child’s cot and a blood red sheep skin. It is a physical representation of a traumatic childhood memory. Upon moving the work around my studio with no intentions of ever showing it, I decided that lugging the heavy and cumbersome item around was just like carrying the memory with me throughout the years. It was then that I decided to take the sculpture with me everywhere I went in public for two weeks during the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival in 2015. I wanted to show how difficult it is to carry these traumas around so large in our minds. We are often hindered by this. We sometimes cannot get in and out of the places that we want to be in life whilst carrying these huge burdens around with us. I constantly had to disassemble and reassemble the cot to get into pubs and restaurants. I had to lug it up and down stairs and load it in and out of the car. A very symbolic gesture of what happens in our lives as we continue to hang on to things which no longer serve us. In the end, I decided to take MONSTER up onto the desolate and unforgiving moors to burn it on American independence day. I collected the remnants of the burnt cot and reassembled a much smaller version of the work. Monster is now an icon the size of a standard lunch box. We can never completely forget these things. We do have to carry them around with us, but sometimes we can learn to make them smaller and more manageable. That is what making this piece of work did for me.

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