Tumbling blocks
Mixed media2011
As an intuitive response to the sudden death of my mother I walked down the Suffolk coast, reconsidering the landscape of my childhood through the eyes of an adult, mourner and artist.
Concrete cubes sporadically emerged along the route, sole man-made interjections into a landscape of permanent flux.
They immediately took me back to the memory of a jumper my mother knitted as a gift to my dad one Christmas. The landscape provoked further recollections as I walked through it, and these absurd cubes offered themselves as blank vessels into which I could store these memories, emotions and ideas.
As I walked through the fog the cubes offered perspective, their staccato rhythm implied a passing time, their angular form suggested a grid and attempted rationalisation of a chaotic, uncontrollable nature.
Though as my journey progressed the reassurances they offered became less secure – the more I considered the more I noticed how uneven and irregular the blocks were as the soft sands under shifted them over time, nature slowly wrapped and crushed the concrete, and how some disappeared over the edge of the receding cliffs.
This project runs parallel to a poetic essay, which was later published in the Journal of Civic Architecture and can be read HERE.
