Peter Goldfield's A Drop to
Drink
Installation |
Peter Goldfield asks,
"How often have you been in an outdoor pool with wonderful,
colourful, contemporary artworks playing over the water?"
As part of the Millennium Festival and
Somerset Art Weeks, Peter Goldfield's Year of the
Artist (June 2000 - May 2001) commissioned photographic
flags were on view at the Huish Episcopi Swimming Pool from
September 16th to 23rd and are now suspended from the roof
beams of the Bridport Arts Centre until October
21st.
"Drop to Drink"
Peter
Goldfield |
His big banners, "flown from 25ft flagpoles like
the red flags carried by the horsemen in Kurosawa's Macbeth"
were exposed to the inclement weather, so much so, in fact,
that "one of the flagpoles was broken as the banners acted
like sails anchored to the earth".
Climatic conditions
have very much to do with the underlying theme of this work
for global warming and its effect on weather is one of
Goldfield's utmost concerns. He claims that the problem of
the lack of available drinking water is never far from his
mind. Thus, each of the banners is meant to represent an
aspect of our perception of water.
With these
colourful and seemingly playful images, Goldfield wishes to
make certain dire observations and pose specific, and
dreadful, questions: Should we worry about our profligate
use of water when half the world can't get enough to drink?
The watery world from which we emerged has since become
utterly benign; what changes are in store for us in the
future? Our universe and indeed, our own bodies are mainly
composed of water. Global warming could turn our world into a
desert!
"Surftime"
Peter
Goldfield |
This artist has long been exploring the creative
potential of digital imaging and has become, not only one
of the world's most avante garde digital artists, but
also one of its most radical exponents of the digital
revolution. He firmly believes in the benefits of
encouraging children to utilise the new technologies as a
means of liberating their expressive capacities.
To gather the core imagery for the installation
pictures, Goldfield drew from a variety of stock sources, from
his own black and white prints to jpeg images from the
Internet. To produce the flying photographic banners, he
used his own digital laboratory, equiped with Epson's 44"
wide inkjet printer and new inks, technologies said to produce
prints that will last for the incredible period of 200 years.
(While this experienced digital artist praises these
technological advances to no end, other Epson customers
have recently begun to question the actual resistance of the
prints, some of which, while light resistant, are not ozone
resistant.)
In any case, Goldfield celebrates the
overall possibilities new technologies offer to artists, and
potential artists, going so far as to exclaim, "The
computer is the most powerful artists' tool the universe has
ever known".
Bridport Arts Centre 5th - 21st
October
Dillington House, Ilminster 4th
November
Watershed,
Bristol 10th - 12th November
To visit installation, click here |
