Mayfair Art Weekend, 2021.

London and most cities are full of statues. Soldiers and benefactors, reformers and heroes people the streets alongside the existing population. In some ways they are the winners but usually they depict the past and they straddle the living town with the dead one. 

Like gravestones they are markers or stand-ins, upright and human sized, bronze or stone they allow a cross over between flesh and architecture, present and past, reality and depiction. 

At school pickup I watched the passing shoppers through the car windscreen as if it was a river or a movie and realised that right here was an endless supply of models, a huge catalogue of various possible statues.

I installed a camera on a traffic island near my studio and recorded the lunchtime pedestrians crossing at the lights. Long hair is the title and each work has a similar catchphrase to allow cataloguing and easy form filling.

I will never know who they are as with most passing humans. They are strangers known by a shape, a walk, a colour only. I chose the colour of the statue from the blackish reflective coat, if they had passed and the police asked you for a description, you might remember this flash of colour only and maybe the bag and long hair.

 

May 12, 2021