public sculpture

Collaborative Azulejo /  by Mark Gubb

A massive, public, collaborative, azulejo.

An azulejo is a large, tiled, painting (usually blue on white), found primarily in Portugal.

Azulejos often depict biblical, mythological, or historical scenes.

This would be a public mural of-sorts, tiled onto the side of a large building with an open invitation for community members to come and add a bit from their own experience/life/perspective.

Marble Foot /  by Mark Gubb

A marble sculpture of one of my feet, attached to a marble base - as if a fragment from a larger sculpture.

Include this work in every exhibition/project/installation I ever have, with an invitation for visitors to touch the foot to bring them good luck.

Over time this repetitive action will begin to polish and wear-away the marble, as we see with sculptures around the world purported to contain good luck.

My Empire of Dirt /  by Mark Gubb

A two part project/sculpture/installation, existing concurrently.

One part involves the purchase of a standard single burial plot in a cemetery. The plot is then dug, as if ready to receive a burial.

In the other part, the earth removed from that burial plot is exhibited as a mound in a room/gallery somewhere else (logically, within the same city/town).

Both spaces can be visited by the public.

Memory Tree /  by Mark Gubb

An adolescent tree sapling planted as a communal public artwork, where local residents are invited to come and tie or chain items of sentimental value to it.

As the tree grows, the items will slowly become consumed by the expanding tree and become part of its fabric, forever. A living time-capsule.

Little Echo /  by Mark Gubb

An architectural/housing development of a handful of Spanish-style bungalows/shotgun shacks set around a small body of water with a water-feature based on the hi-jets in Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles.

The artwork is the endeavour of building the bungalows and doing the landscaping, but once they exist they can be run as residency live/work studios and low-cost housing for artists.

Evil Portal /  by Mark Gubb

A huge holographic installation in a desert somewhere.

This is based on (essentially a recreation of) a scene from the film ‘Time Bandits’.

In one scene of the film, the Time Bandits find themselves in a desert and come across an invisible barrier they can’t pass through. They start arguing and one of them picks up a nearby skull from a deceased animal (maybe human, I need to check) and throws it at the person they’re arguing with.

The skull misses the person and smashes through the invisible barrier, shattering it like a massive piece of glass, and making a huge hole in it, which reveals The Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (a scary castle) behind.

This sculpture/installation would be a massive glass hologram in the desert, in the shape of a huge broken sheet of glass, with an image of a scary fortress/castle in it.

A Repurposed Statue /  by Mark Gubb

The world is in a constant state of upheaval and in recent years we’ve seen various uprisings and societal collapses. What often goes along with that is the destruction of public statues and monuments representative of a formerly oppressive regime.

Statues tend to be heavy things, so when they’re not being dragged into Bristol docks, they’re often dismantled using cranes.

I’ve often been struck by the powerful images of statues of dictators being removed from their plinths, hoisted high in the air, by a chain round their neck. There’s something very brutal and precarious about this image - like a metaphorical lynching of the oppressor.

For this work I propose a temporary (could be permanent) public sculpture that consists of a removed-statue, hanging by a chain round its neck, dangling from a crane.