This project exhibited in 'Degree Show One' at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design. This was my final piece from studying BA Fine Art for 3 years. I built a massive sphere, an installation that "collapses" when the audience enters and walks into the centre. The purpose of the installation was to encompass sensory immersion using sound and vibrating the platform. Once stood in the very centre of the 5 metre x 5 metre x 5 metre sphere, the top of the sphere "collapses" downward and rewinds back up reforming its spherical structure.
Concept:
The ‘Collapse’ is a continuous, transformative space that recreates the instance right before death occurs. The audience is put into a position of intrusion, becoming the intruder triggering a disruption in the still environment, altering space, the massive structure/object and prompting death of space and the object. The object represents a dying sun, an eclipse instigating a big change, a disturbance in nature and time. Disturbance in nature such that what is seen as a robust, dense rock changes into a mechanical, collapsing machine. Disturbance in time such that the act of collapsing is halted, paused and rewinds back to its initial state to only repeat its beginning stage of deconstruction again and again. The audience triggers a generator of power within the structure that predicts its own eventual collapse. The audience is placed in a space that harvests an encounter of his/her own fear of death, of the inevitable. The timer is set for his/her end of time.
Performance - Internal Death:
“Internal Death” was a performance endured by a man who is tortured at the thought of his inescapable death.
The performance was structured in two phases :
Phase one was the internal torture of the thought of nearing death
Phase two was the acceptance and surrender to silence.
Phase One:
The tormented Man(Samuel Dauncey) was hanged on ropes and wooden poles inside the structure, at the centre facing the audience coming in. He was covered in black oil and was visibly and audibly in pain; pain that intensified every time the top of the structure would move. He would sporadically make eye contact with the audience to communicate that sooner or later, his pain will be the pain of each and every one of us.
The keepers of the Sphere (Emanuel Tomozei & Alexis Marie Sinchongco) were the relentless machinic souls that want to keep the cycle of life and death intact. They were building, hammering and preserving the mechanism.
Phase Two
The man who was suspended now lies on the floor at the bottom of the Sphere. He is helpless, his cries diminished and he looks up to the audience and to the light coming in from above. The keepers destroy the sphere and slowly bury the man alive.
The cycle will not end.