These works are a collective assemblage of multimedia art works centred on the process of agency, demonstrated in three key focal points: the relationship between an object and its environment, the relationship between an object and another object, and the relationship between an object and ourselves. Each of these points, in the case of this piece, is addressed via the interaction and play with various rocks of differing shapes and sizes, found and collected at random in and around the Cypriot town of Lemba.
drag, 2018. Cyprus College of Art
video for projection/monitor, 20:20 minutes, 2018.
The piece follows my attempted effort to drag a gradually growing accumulation of rocks up a hill. Pulled back by the restraint and “drag” of the rocks, the act is a multifaceted reflection on natural ontology and our own human lives. Imbued culturally with Sisyphean connotations, there is a reference to absurdism and the absurdity of existence.
I explore the interplay between myself and the rocks I drag behind me via the long ropes, climbing a steady incline that extends from the sea – my starting point – to the town, wherein I will reach my final destination where the rocks will be displayed. Over the course of 3 hours of dragging, I experience the rocks’ restraint and reluctance to be moved; I hear their gritty weight grinding on the road behind me; I feel the hard tug on my body in the tautness of the ropes. The rocks have their will just as I have mine.
balance/breathe, 2018
dimensions variable
materials variable
studio view: Cyprus College of Art, Cyprus, 2018
photos: Benja
This piece exists primarily as a concept and is unrestrained to any specific form; but in the case of this collection of works, it comprises six large rocks taken from a dried riverbed and arranged on top of one another in an unfixed display of balance and sculptural dominance as the rocks stand and oppose their viewer with an anthropomorphic stance. The concept of this piece is the will and communion of the rocks (or indeed any object) – the way in which they allow themselves to be arranged and how they conduct their own stacking, surreptitiously controlling me as I adhere to their will.
In other words, sometimes things can only go a certain way, and each of us simply has to comply. One cannot force the wrong puzzle piece to fit another – the puzzle demands its own construction.
Space/solidity, 2018
Cyprus College of Art, Cyprus
photos: Benja
Each photograph here depicts the image of my hand positioned in various ways in relation to the formations of different rocks. If the rock exhibits a hole, I will put my hand through it; if the rock exhibits a bump I will put my arm around it. But are these actions entirely my decision if they are dependent on the form of that specific rock? Or can it be said that the same force that made the rocks that way is the force that controls my will to engage with such forms? Again, pictorially, the agency is conveyed here as the rocks’.