Dunhill and O'Brien

Two versions of this work were made in 2005, one in the UK and one in Holland.

The basic proposition of this complicated and convoluted work was to make a new clay sculpture that would be a ‘meeting place of different cultures and times in the history of Sculpture’. The work also continued with an earlier theme of celebrating holes in sculpture and further elaborated upon a system to avoid any interference of personal taste or the ‘hand of the artist’.

A crew of 20 participants were employed to make clay models at a rate of 5 per hour based on 500 images of sculptures, ranging from prehistoric ritual objects to contemporary artworks, selected because they had some form of hole in them. These images had been manipulated to remove any reference to scale, location or other contextual information.

Once modelled the freshly made clay forms were photographed before being placed on wooden trays that moved slowly around an inclined elevator. At a height of approximately 5 metres the forms dropped in to a display case (at a rate of 1 every 30 seconds) where they accumulated to form the new Sculpture.

The final presentation of the work involved all of the materials and works space involved in making the Sculpture with a 4 hour video of the vitrine during the making of the work.

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