Sometimes standing, sometimes falling

Sometimes standing sometimes falling, 2025
Found metal, wooden roofing,mixed media in paper pulp, rust, broken shoe sole
120 x 170 x 60 cm

Exhibited in Four stones, a secret, a spiral, The Netty (Fish Factory), Seydisfjordur, Iceland, October 2025.

Bring together an accumulation of found things, made things, all existing in this one symbiotic happening. ‘Sometimes standing sometimes falling’ is the statement that departs another on its first reception, this skeleton and sculpture that seems to do both.

‘It’s perfectly contaminated’,

’It is like a puppet’

‘An abject scream’

These could easily be its title too

This spine of rusted metal was passed into my hands during my first days of being in Seydisfjordur, a town in North East Iceland. Passed to me in the dark of an empty silo, I didn’t know initially what the metal structure was but it asserted me as something also standing and in similar dimensions to myself. I didn’t receive it visually but initially as a weight, an oily scent, a clang of its feet hitting the silo surface below and it’s gaps that my own limbs could hold and hang onto. I went back to the silo a few days later to seek out this invisible rusted thing I only knew as a touch, a smell, a sound. I felt like a dog sniffing for food, a land-walking sea creature with sound waves for speech but I didn’t know what to call out. I eventually found the pincher-shaped metal when my eyes adjusted to the dark silo space, it was sleeping under a pipe in the centre of the silo. I let it gape out the same clangs and metallic creaks on our first meeting, just to confirm it was the same piece of metal I was seeking. I walked back with it clamped upon my shoulder, my lime green coat becoming stained with the rust that still remains on in despite me washing it three times since. Me and that metal creature sat for many days together in the studio that I had once at the edge of the fjord. As did the other objects that joined us, the shoe sole without its shoe, a piece of rusted drain covering, black sand from nearby beaches, broken roofing from who knows which roof, handwritten notes, an unwanted painting, scrapped drawings and donated paper waste.

‘An abject scream’ can an object, object in becoming an object when it doesn’t want to be seen? All of these objects, the crunchy surfaces, forgotten fragments I spotted in the street, this scalped column of wall, of roof, or shed maybe. Does this wood-grained slither object from being a tree? An interior, an exterior from an interior, what does it have to say about being suffocated by a sponge, compressed and forced into flatness only to be pushed out again as an echo of what it was before and what about this whisper that it might now be a sculpture? Was the tree not the very same just untitled with its outdoor name, its birth name, what would it be called in its teenage years? A plank of wood, smooth laminate flooring. I think a bird box could be between it’s forties and early retirement.

‘An abject scream’ a friend gave me this response to my new sculpture ‘sometimes standing sometimes falling’ I like these readings, they feel close to the way the word ‘guttural’ sounds, very much a gut sound and a gut feeling. I just learnt ‘abject’ means to be present in the maximum, its the perfect word. Maybe the sculpture feels at its maximum before it or during the flight of a scream. I am abject to this road that I walk down, maybe one I’ve considered less due to its humbler water trickles rather than the roars from Gufu the waterfall up the road. This road and its industrial-ness, considered ugly most probably by most but I’m fond of it as an aesthetic because of my industrial green-filled hometown. The staggered green stripes of a piece of rope I kept seeing on this road, sure one day I would pick it up to place into paper pulp. The day I decide to I go to it and its vacuum-packed into the tarmac of the ground, encased in ice, my fingers can’t get to it. So I can only walk away and forget about it until the day I find it sat quietly in the studio, as if it had decided to walk over itself and say, yes now you can have me. Patience and persistence for this dear paper pulp, ah how I am constantly reminded of it.

All magnificent and maximum to me and my eyes and what they can hold and my mind unbuffered by the mossy-ness that keeps going and showing me new landscapes to enter without having to knock at a door. I go straight in.