All seeing eye (revisited) - sand sculpture

about 4 years ago

Do you ever get a feeling someone is watching you? Well I do and i'ts not something I feel too comfortable with. You only have to walk from one end of a city street to the other to be plastered all over monitors in some dark room somewhere. I don't care what everyone says about me, I am not paranoid, but the CCTV cameras surrounding us makes me feel uneasy. Knowing that at any moment I could be stalked and followed as I go about my daily life. The strange thing is, I know this because if I had these tools I would probably be doing exactly the same, Just for the shits and giggles.

I made this piece along with fellow Irish sculptor Alan Magee in Rorschach, Switzerland and part of a fun competition. As artists Alan and myself have explored the idea of surveillance and voyeurism in our own work and when we came together to decide what to make we threw a few ideas around and came up with this. Alan tackled the front electronic eye and I did the ominous figure inside.

I thought he should be like he was part of the machine, as if he was some 'Matrix' like figure. Surrounded by monitors, giving him an all seeing view of the world. He appears to be tapping one of the monitors because of a loss of signal though, in fact for the sculpture I wanted to use his finger to support the dome of televisions.

The sand is really nice in Rorschach but I wasn't willing to take the risk of total collapse in the short time we had to make the sculpture. We compacted the sand by hand and you really never know until your first disaster. So extending the arm to create a support seemed like a good safety measure.

I'm not really sure if people understood our Idea but we had a great time making it beside a beautiful lake Konstanz in the sun. It was nice to see our two approaches to the idea come together as one.

Why revisited?

I shared this piece before on Steem, in the early days before I knew what I was up to. Now I am sharing again with new images and text because I am documenting my sculptures in chronological order and this one is next on the list.

Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.