Juxtaposing. A word much overused in my art college days. Recently, however, I have been reconsidering its meaning as part of the renewed social interest in how we abut, encounter, interface and perhaps even co-exist with each other during the continuing pandemic. In this context, I started to juxtapose sculptures made just pre-Covid with those made more recently. In the last blog post, I shared the process of making a painting on the theme of breathing, using blown bubbles and paint. The image above (left) uses the floor cloth from this experiment. It is draped over a piece of studio furniture - an old lectern from an unknown church. Onto this, I set a piece of sculpture made from driftwood which I had collected in the West of Ireland. The sculpture is called Mother and Child. Bringing these three elements together - the lectern, the stained sheet and the sculpture gave the piece a cohesion which was not apparent when the elements were randomly dispersed around the studio. As a reflection on this, I concluded that there is nothing to fear from bringing diverse materials or objects (or people) together as the sum of the parts can progress us towards new ways of thinking and seeing, refreshing old ideas and adding new layers of meaning.
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