Output details

Spoons (Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary)

‘Spoons’ is a large-scale sculpture and video. It utilises the repetition of simple manual labour, offered as sculptural ‘reprocessing,’ and contributes to socio-cultural debates, particularly Marxist critiques of commodification. A repetitive process is applied to multiple, mass-produced and everyday appropriated objects, namely 9273 plastic spoons and 3091 rubber bands. Three spoons are held together with a rubber band to form a unit, 3091 units tessellate to build an 8-foot tall pyramid. Over time the rubber band rots and the sculpture decays returning to an unconstructed pile of spoons and rubber. The temporal nature of the sculpture, its construction process and its component material is offered both within the real-time sculpture and the speedy hyperreality of a time-lapse. The output was first presented in the inaugural exhibition at the new premises of the Museum of Art and Design in New York as part of the exhibition ‘Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary’ (2008-2009) curated by David Revere McFadden, Lowery Stokes Sims and Brian Parkes. This international group show included contributions from 52 artists including Ai Weiwei, Cornelia Parker, Do Ho Suh, Al Anatsui. It attracted a breadth of reviews from the art press, magazines and newspapers worldwide, such as Elle Korea, International Design Magazine, and American and British Craft Council Magazine. The reviews presented specific debates about the issues regarding the transformation of objects, offering a 'second life' to usually defunct or recycled materials. An artist statement and images of past work were included in the exhibition catalogue (pp. 220-223), and a review by Elaine Louie, 'What to Do With 3,091 Rubber bands?' was published in the New York Times (September 11, 2008). This particular output is also included in, group exhibition ‘The Plaza Principle’ Leeds (2010).