Absence and Presence, Part 1 (2017)

In the late 1990s, in England, I spent many hours building an artwork by hand. My aim was to use the sun’s power to extract music from rain. The studio process was fiddly and hugely time consuming, and the result was a clumsy sculptural ‘instrument’ which was never exhibited working. I eventually cased up the artwork, and a friend kindly offered to store it under her veranda. Shortly after this my friend fell ill. She passed away in 2004, and soon afterwards her partner had to move out of their home. While helping her to move I collected the encased artwork, and it languished, unopened, under my studio bench until 2017. This work is based around the still unopened case and X-rays of it.

 

Materials: solid state metronome
(early 1960s), sculpture (1997), homemade case (2002), disassembled plinth (2011), X-rays and Polaroids (2017)

Dimensions: 480 (h) x 1670 x 1300 mm