Going, Going, Gone

2018. Site specific sculpture, mirror, reflected sunlight, cut ladders

As part of the Waterloo Festival 2018, a London Group exhibition of ephemeral Art "Nothing endures but change" curated by Susan Haire. This Site Specific piece reflects the abstracted words GOING and GONE onto the walls of St John's Church, Waterloo. Exploiting the vagaries of sunlight, cloud, weather the  sunlight tracks the words throughout the day. GOING early on and GONE in the later on.

During the making of this piece it went through various incarnations,  broadening and then disregarding components and versions. My process is to explore a piece on many fronts and then to cut it back to find the essential and the essence.

It began with ideas about the auctioning off of London to the highest bidder, with the letters being on estate agent signs and the fleeting and fleeing communities pushed to the outskirts by gentrification.

The practicalities of how to support the words led me to the ladders.

I was reminded of a performance art piece I had done as part of Waterloo Sunset Live in 1982 and how I had my  friends running up and down ladders to reveal huge paintings I had done on wallpaper rolls , slice by slice which crashed to the ground.

One of the performers, my best friend Michael Howard, later on created a lot of sculptural pieces making tapering and twisted ladders, which may or may not have been influenced by this performing experience. We often collaborated.

20 years ago this month Michael died, so I decided to use the motif of his ladders in yet another collaboration.  This of course adds another layer to this. Pondering those of us still Going and those that have Gone.

More and more I notice that the process of making an artwork is a tide of ideas, processes. practicalities, contexts and contents which ebb, flow, vie and compete towards a final outcome. I am one who needs a deadline to force me to bring everything together. It comes together. But necessarily we do not see the journey of discarded alleyways.