FRESH AIR SCULPTURE BIENNIAL SCHOOLS ACTIVITY PACK

As part of the Fresh Air Sculpture 2022 Education Programme, a schools activity pack was requested that developed the themes addressed in the sculpture, Grown Up. The Activity Pack included a colouring exercise developed from the age spectrum applied to the sculpture and instructions in the making of a model of the piece, as well as an explanation of the ideas embodied in the artwork. This text  provided an opportunity to condense the underlying hypothesis concerning our experience of the phenomenon of ‘age’, which underpins my ongoing PhD research and my current sculpture practice, into a readily accessible format.

TEXT FOR SCHOOLS PACK

 Grown Up (Quennington) 

The sculpture is all about how natural things change and grow with time.

You might have noticed that the things around you are always changing; trees grow, fruit ripens and skin wrinkles. The fact is that our world is characterised by change. This could be very confusing if, for example, when we returned to a tree that we had last seen in the winter to find it covered with leaves, we thought it was a completely different tree.

However, as the Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, noticed, we do not recognise the things around us just by their ‘substance’, but we also know them by their ‘nature’, the way that they change. He believed that, for us, this nature, or ‘change-story’, was a part of the object.

If we look at the things that we eat, a juicy red apple for instance, we can see how useful it is to know the way that things change, their nature. As you know, apples slowly grow from blossom flowers on apple trees and get bigger and bigger until they reach a point where they contain lots of sugar and they are ready to eat. After this, though, they tend to fall from the tree, get eaten by small animals and go rotten, so there is only a very short time that the apple is of any use to us as food. It is important, then, to know when this moment is coming (and when it arrives) and we do this by checking (subconsciously in our minds) how far the apple has got in its ‘change-story’ every time we see one. It is actually in our nature to do this with all objects so, every time we see anything, we mentally ‘measure’ where it has got up to in its change-story. We ‘see’ our mind’s change measurements as an object’s ‘age’.

Of course, people change as well. We start as babies but grow into children and then adults (who have children themselves) and eventually become old people. We ‘age’ like everything else.

When I made this sculpture, I wanted to show a figure that both measures and is measured. Like us, the sculpture grows wider as it grows taller. The arms are similarly structured but they are outstretched and suggest the act of measuring.

The colours of the sculpture at Quennington are taken from the changing colours of leaves as they get older; at different times of the year, different parts of the sculpture will ‘disappear’ against the changing background. The colours are made stronger and applied in bands so the sculpture looks a bit like a measuring rod, or ruler.