Initial sketch for Invasion

Listen With Your Eyes, The mixing of

PLAY 50 Upper Brook Street 

8-16.10.09

red and yellow and pink and green

The Fall

Somerset House 13.2.09

For the commissioned installation, The Fall, I was given a five-story stairwell at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Images of Dantes Inferno, The Circles of Hell came to mind as I began putting sketches together that prolonged the decent of the dough.

At each level the meshes of the nets were tighter than the one above it, slowing and constricting the inventible path. I wanted to see fleshy lumps straining against taught ropes. Each net more suffocating. Harder to break through.

Processes of aging, fear of growing old – loosing the momentum of youth. The nets suggest stages of life, summaries of chapters.

The strands of dough falling at different speeds like memory’s elastic concept of time.

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Even though I worked on the idea for several months, on the evening of the installation I hadn’t prepared for the theatrics of the piece. Thank you to Jack, Ross and George who filled the 1st net with the dough, sweating and working away for 40mins as they dangled over a 20m drop. Meanwhile, I shouted and sweated whilst loosely holding a rope and chain. Once filled, the net was wrenched into place. My mouth dried. The 200kg lump of dough  loomed ominously above the crowd that had gathered. The rigging held and slowly the dough moved.

It took 30mins before the dough reached the 2nd net, and a further three hours to reach the final level.