Monday, January 13, 2014

Monument to the Plinth

I was thinking about the nature of the assignment of creating a collapsible structure for _____. It calls for something temporary, mobile, adaptable. So what is the opposite of that? In sculpture? = the monument. A monument is supposed to be permanent, a reminder of an event or public figure, stationary, fixed meaning and specific to one area (symbolic).
It might be interesting to explore the idea of the monument: a permanent piece vs collapsible/mobile.
- a monument to what?
- a reoccurring event: war, falling in love, heartbreak, death of art and beauty
What is the thing that's most unmovable about the monument? The plinth (on which stand General XX or Professor YY or Darcy MacLarty, humanitarian Xtreem).
So my piece would be expressing the reusable/temporary nature of the idea of the monument.
It's like a celebration of the events and people that we hold sacred, which changes in times as we live and grow. People mean different things to us at different times in our lives.
I'd like to use an ephemeral material like cardboard to create a series of plinths that can stack on top of each other but then can be dismantled and fit inside each other like a matroyshka.
I like the idea of taking a traditional  form of remembering something/one specific (set in stone) but making it impermanent so that the memory is lost.

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