The tip of the iceberg
The tip of the iceberg
The catalyst for making this piece was the Covid-19 pandemic. My experience during lockdown was very personal, emotional, and uncertain. I experienced loss, anxiety, and had to filter out tons of misleading information. Most people across the globe had similar or worse experiences.
The piece is comprised of two main segments, a manually carved marble hand that is set on top of a burnt tree trunk pedestal. There are three components that can be inserted into the holes of the burnt tree base, or into the web like structure of the marble hand; a vaccine, a signing pen, and a bullet.
The hand sculpture is a copy of my wife’s hand, intimate, fragile, detailed, and unique, much like the individual Covid-19 experiences of billions of people across the globe. The web/or sponge-like structure growing out of the hand represents the information that society had to absorb daily during quarantine.
The three components:
The vaccine is a highly political topic yet hits everyone very personally. It can be viewed as a resource to bring the world closer to normality, or as a source of fear, distrust, misinformation, and false hope.
The pen represents governments and the bills they sign into action, either directly or indirectly affecting individuals. The pen may set in motion a series of dominos, be it lockdown measures during a pandemic, environmental legislation, human rights, and racial justice.
The bullet represents the blowback from laws being signed into action, or likewise the direct violence of a government’s military taking action through the signing of a bill.
All of this stands on a burnt tree trunk, which is a commentary directly related to the current state of our planet. Fires around the world are becoming a more severe issue, connected to rising global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions. The covid-19 pandemic is only the tip of the iceberg of problems on this planet. One issue cannot be examined individually, rather everything must be packed as a whole, and firstly we must take care of our planet and each other.