Top – Victoria and Albert Museum Cast Room undergoing works.

The casts, as artefacts that are not only valuable as secondary source reference and as a Victorian alternative to stealing the primary artefacts, but also as a primary source for students of the art of plaster casting, are crated up just to be moved around the floor of the gallery. The combination of the timber batten, polystyrene softening and casts make fascinating structures and a great literal representation of Form, Frame, Fracture. they are like sculpture turned inside out. And they’ve all huddled together – a new conversation.

However here is my FFF project so far:

Below – The Wasteland II (Pennant Sandstone) trial sculptures. April 2016.I think I have been resisting using my current practice to address this project – Perhaps I thought it was too obvious an interpretation to create the form within a frame and then smash off parts of the form. But in fact it gives me the chance to revisit this work that I had set aside after doing them as kind of trial/maquettes. The initial sculpture was conceived as a landscape, resonating De Chirico and H G Wells deserted structures at the end of the Human era in The Time Machine, as well as images of the great Mediterranean avenues of Beirut during the civil war 1975 – 90 when I was young.

And now seen again in Syria. Aleppo.

The Wasteland (Ancaster limestone 2014)

I had already decided that Form would represent birth, Frame life and Fracture death, but that the word Fracture was an open ended word that leads back to Form – Death and Life are inseparable. Here is Beirut now.

Rebuilt but underpopulated.

The Square by De Chirico (1914),

Strange similarities with the photo of Beirut Rebuilt. The photo almost out-Surreals the painting! The painting is full of Phallic dream imagery. This makes me think of the ruined buildings as phallic. In the Arthurian Romances (15th Century Europe) the land is wasted because the King is wounded. His wound is described as being in the groin or thigh, a metaphorical impotency. He was wounded by a boars tusk or by a spear thrust, both having phallic symbolism. Can the ruins of Beirut and Aleppo be seen to symbolise, or be an expression or a symptom of the impotency of those who are causing the destruction?