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.

Origami Extreme by Mark Gubb

Take a sheet of any size screw-up-able material and screw it up into a ball.

Take a photo.

Flatten it out again and trace over every fold and crease line with a fine-liner pen.

The reference photo and the lines on the piece of paper then exist as some sort of extreme (impossible?) origami proposition.

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.

Blackboards by Mark Gubb

Fill a room/gallery with blackboards, so it looks a bit like an exhibition of Joseph Beuys blackboards from his lectures, but the diagrams on the blackboards are copies of blackboards from scenes in films, such as when Lieutenant Harris is writing on a blackboard in front of the new recruits in the first Police Academy movie.

Hiraeth by Mark Gubb

A digital screen/monitor attached to a computer showing every tweet, in real time, that contains the word or hashtag ‘hiraeth’ in it.

Hiraeth is Welsh word meaning a deep longing for something, particularly one’s home.

Often described as an untranslatable word, as there is no direct translation in English, I’ve just translated it for you.

All in This Together print/sculpture by Mark Gubb

The phrase ‘All in this together’ written in the style of the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate outside of Auschwitz, rendered as a print or sculpture.

‘We’re all in this together’ become the catchphrase and persistent lie of the Tory party from 2008 onwards to justify the crippling programme of austerity they unleashed upon the UK.