My
artistic practice has derived from my interest in historical artefacts,
situations and objects that have accidentally survived into the modern era and which
provide a memory stimulus to form the basis of our ‘knowledge’ of an event or
person.
The Arab Spring Network is my latest piece and was inspired by a journey I
undertook from Carthage to Cairo through Tunisia, Libya and Egypt coinciding
with Mohamed Bouaziz’s self-immolation in 2010. This act of protest may be
regarded as the start of the ongoing Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle
East. I wanted to use the psychogeography implicit in this journey as the
starting point for my final BA Art & Design piece.
The
Arab Spring riots came about as a result of various and varied actions by many disparate
people, expressing their dissatisfaction with their governments and political
systems. I found this to have a
significant parallel to the many historical mosaics I photographed on my
journey. Mosaics are a traditional
method of using numerous small tesserae to produce a coherent and harmonious picture. When researching methods of portraying this change
from fragmentation into the whole, I realised that traditional quilt production
(the earliest quilt in the world survives from 980BC in Egypt) also echoed this
process.
The Arab Spring Network consists of an artwork reflects both the great number of
participants to the revolutionary process and its historical antecedents.
The fabric mosaic pieces are mounted on a fragile net background
reflecting the network of communication which enabled the Arab Spring to
flourish.
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