Mountains Sun and Snake / Guanshan Water Park / Taitung / Taiwan.

Commissioned by Land Festival / 2022

3.5m diameter.

Notes from my residency in Taitung. 

In honesty there wasn’t enough time to do this commission justice, in honesty the money should have been invested in a local artist and not me. In the time given I did my best to understand the context and work with local people to create something they would love. I especially valued talking to Han, he drove me about in his van and showed me the sea, the mountains and the villages, we talked a lot about plants and family and food. His van was full of relics collected from the landscape, wood and bone and seeds. He told me that the snake was special to the local community. That it was a sacred animal native to Taitung so I decided that an image of the snake was bold and simple. I used cut granite in different colours to represent the sun and the mountains surrounding the snake. 

It is impossible to ignore the mountains here. They have an enormous presence and are visible across the country from every place I have been. They are everywhere. massive beings dominating every view. At night when you can’t see them you can feel them there. When it comes to climbing mountains I don’t like the idea that they are something to be ‘conquered’ and that the extremity of it is attractive to visitors. Instead I would like a reason to explore, an invitation to learn something from them. I think its about respect. Today there was an earthquake. Han told me there are a lot in Taiwan due to the tectonic plates meeting in the China Sea nearby. If there aren’t regular ones then people begin to worry about a serious one coming. I’m sure the locals would laugh at me but it absolutely shocked me, I froze as the room shook and listened to the terrifying sounds of it moving. Then scrambled to get my thoughts together on what to do if it got worse. I decided I would try to turn the sofa over and hide under it. (I thought this but didn’t actually progress to doing it) Another reminder of the incredible forces behind those high knife like ridges.

Having time to sit and think in a new place I feel that I am missing the point somehow. That there are important things to do and I’m not doing them. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this feeling, and the fact that I have the privilege of time to sit here thinking is a good reason to be doing something worthwhile. Trying to make a living as an artist is strange. There can be an arrogance to art that I have never felt ok with. Its easy to get preoccupied with peer relationships. striving for recognition in a sphere that you feel represents you. being in a different place starkly reveals to me the irrelevance of these cultural peer groups when it comes to the larger picture. 

I want my work to be about listening. Imposing narratives doesn’t feel right to me. stories are all around us waiting to be revealed. a collaboration between my internal landscape, other people and the environment. My work is about pushing and pulling and finding spaces in between where there is balance between different factors. Nothing appears binary to me. For this reason every project is a learning curve and i am never comfortable. I never know what to do, or what I will do. I never find my ‘identity’. This is not easy in a commercially driven industry. I have to find ways to fight for advocating the unknown. This does not mean to say I’m creating work that is ‘different’ or is some kind of statement. It is just the value placed on the unique relationship each project has with its context.