Plummet
Plummet is a work that developed to show with Glow at the Glynn Vivian Gallery Swansea in 2001. The room in which I was to place the gilded light bulbs had a beautiful parquet floor; several of the blocks were already loose.
The loose blocks were replaced with cast glass ones that had been gilded on the underneath. The process of casting into sand created a textured underneath that rippled with small troughs and dents that looked like the sea.
Glow cut through the physical space of the room creating a field that hung in mid air allowing just enough room to walk around its sides. Plummet was to draw our attention to the floor and to understand that the surface upon which we walk is not as it seems.
The floor in this instance is also part of the ceiling for the room below. The clear glass illustrates the physical thickness of the immediate layer. Being see-through it also opens the mind to consider what lies beneath the surfaces we take for granted. We habitually treat aspects of the world in a two dimensional manner, filtering out and disseminating vast quantities of visual material quite unconsciously. Our minds take short cuts and we pass through the spaces in our world unheeding of the layers and strata and number of other components that we need, take for granted but are hidden from view. Networks of cables, wires, ducts, tubes, rubble, building materials.