Questioning Cities

“Questioning Cities” is a series of work about our cities, made from items cast off by our cities.  Street furniture, dropped hardware, upcycled offcuts, stray tools, automobile parts, bits of cloud servers, failed bearings, lost marbles, wood from downed trees, retired lock cylinders, bullet casings, glass and plastic plucked from the seashore, single use vape parts, and miscellaneous remnants combine unexpectedly, to pose questions about their origins.  Each individual part in these works has had a unique, and mostly functional, past life.  Now retired from their intended purpose, they now form familiar landscapes, for you to explore and reflect on.

“Questioning Cities” asks you to think about the relationships between you, your city, and the environment.  In particular:

1. Consider the relationships between our cities’, past, present, and future.  What was here before?  How do you honor and preserve the past?  Are you comfortable with growth and change?  Have you reflected on our interconnectivities and dependencies?

2. Consider the relationships of our cities to the sea.  We rely on the sea for food, air, water, minerals, transport, and entertainment.  At the same time, we wreak havoc on it by overfishing, destroying ecosystems, and filling it with trash.  Even our most desirable products end up as pollutants.  Where is the disconnect?  Is it too hidden from everyday life for us to care?  What are you doing to reconnect and protect it?

3. Consider the relationship between our cities and the land.  Man has conquered nature, or so we think, yet we are still humbled by it.  How do we reconcile our positive accomplishments with the negative impacts?  Are we doing enough to protect our land, our environment, and our vital resources?  Is nature playing the long game?

4. Consider the value that artists can bring to keeping our city’s waste out of the landfill and natural environment, by breathing new life and value into discarded materials.