Building Mass with a Grain of Sand, 2023
Project shown at J-Spot
Toronto, ON
Extract and refine. Form and transform. Everything comes from many parts of another. It just needs the ingredients, opportunity and time for a process to take place.
Building Mass from a Grain of Sand explores the idea of resources, through form, materiality and concept. The title refers to ideas of the individual versus collective, the tiny versus huge, and those complications that a "resource" can bring into our lives.
Luxurious raw materials like brass and bronze sheets are combined with the more banal sand and found stones, then displayed on broken granite slabs. The materials have their contexts blurred between urban, industrial and residential while their value and importance interrogated. For example sand and pebbles as a key ingredient in concrete are extremely important resources for building the modern urban environment, and the form aims to elevate their status.
Resources are a critical point of tension of human interaction with our planet, our geopolitics, and in a wider sense, our personal experience, relationships and trajectory. Drawing parallels between these diverse ideas of resources, one can ask themselves “what do I have? what do we have? What can we do with it - what should we do with it?”
