'Dome'
Medium: earth, egg, pins (C-type photograph)
When I conceived the idea for this sculpture/image I was interested in the act of piercing a yolk with pins, fixing it to the ground like a specimen. This felt like a small but striking transgression. It also felt like setting a timer in motion on the ultimate miniature, temporary sculpture. As soon as the pins were pushed into the yolk, the integrity of that perfect orange form started to shift, and ultimately the yolk leaked out and the ‘structure’ failed. I like exploring how small actions, the manipulation of everyday objects, can hold a disproportionately large symbolic weight. I also liked the fact that I wasn’t sure if the final piece was the object itself or its photograph.
Quite soon after I made the piece, I realised I had inadvertently created an architectural reconstruction of the millenium dome. I thought it was so appropriate because the dome was created to mark a specific historic point, after which its meaning would also start to leak away. The yolk pinned to the compost resonated with the way ‘brownfield’ sites are developed and seen as a blank slate, a repository for dreams and visions and for utopian architecture that doesn’t always survive with its progressive values intact.
I had been reading a lot of Iain Sinclair’s writing – ‘London Orbital’, ‘Hackney: That Rose Red Empire’ and his exploration of the millenium dome itself, titled ‘Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millenium Dome’. I loved his writing about it, the way he described it in so many spiky, ambivalent ways: ‘a poached egg designed by a committee of vegans’, a ‘yellow-spiked Teflon tent like a genetically modified mollusc’, and ‘….meaningless, magnificent, a pale intruder in the downriver mud.’ He maintains it was an idea that should have remained as a sketch or a proposal, that it was an ‘art world trophy’ that should never have been built.
(All quotations from ‘Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millenium Dome’ by Iain Sinclair)
