'Pierrot' is a solo project I created for a collaborative exhibition held by Independent Record Label ‘Quiet One Music’ and the Interactive Design Team of London College of Communication. The exhibition was held to promote uprising Swedish popstar TOFFE and the release of his first major single ‘Painting Pictures’. (13th May 2017, The Ugly Duck, South London).
The project consists of a large ephemeral installation built from live ivy, and a video projection portraying Pierrot the Clown. The piece was designed to explore the spaces between love and love-loss.
view the project in detail here on my website - https://mattsavage.org/Pierrot-IDA-TOFFE
Both the sculpture and the video combined capture the process from being in love to falling out of love. The sculptural curtain of ivy, painted clown white, is alive, beautiful and delicate, yet is doomed to swiftly wither as it has been ripped from its natural rural state and suspended brutally in a barren industrial setting to be left to die.
The short video is of a performance art piece portraying Pierrot the Clown, a classic figure of sad love, who has also been torn from his natural setting, (the Baroque Stage), and left to wonder through the modern urban landscape. The melancholic clown dances up and down the streets, until he gradually begins to weaken, fade and eventually die, eliciting the same state as the ivy sculpture.
In the warehouse exhibition space of The Ugly Duck, I hung the curtain of ivy from exposed roof scaffolding with fine wire and angled it two feet away from the wall, which created an eery illusion that the ivy was suspended in mid-air. The sculpture measured 2m in width and 3.5m in length, and acted as a contemporary screen for the video projection, as seen in this short film of the IDA+TOFFE Exhibition made by Alexandra Sokolova.
Due to the fragmented surface of the ivy screen, the video projection was distorted and undefined, causing the imagery of the dancing clown to become irregularly focused and break in and out of view across the leaves in a ghostly manner. This effectively prompted the fragility and evanescence of the projects theme and narrative.
When designing Pierrot, I decided to present him as an androgynous being and used a female model to play the clown, (a classic pantomime method), as I felt it would enhance the subtle fragility of the character’s nature. I explored the traditional European Baroque costume, and settled on a minimalistic look, creating a pair of baggy pantaloons and a simple top, designed to expose as much of the upper body as possible. I used a certain type of white acrylic body paint which dried against the skin and gradually cracked and flaked away, which created the illusion that the clown was slowly decaying, (effectively evoking the ephemeral vine sculpture). I also covered the model in baby power which fell from her in clouds of white dust, again suggesting that the clown was gradually disintegrating.
I designed an accessory for the love clown to wear, constructed from live flowers which I had lightly sprayed white and strung up to form a necklace, (again another ephemeral piece). Towards the end of the video, just before the clown begins to die, it eats some of the flowers in a final desperate attempt to ‘take in’ the dying love that is diminishing around it; an idea which I felt was visually provocative and symbolically fitting towards the projects concept overall.
Companies
London College of Communication, UAL
- Education & Research