Fifty two expanded

Fifty Two Expanded was made as part of my 2022 residency and solo show Imagining the Fluidity of Permanence (an exchange between a 21st Century artist and a 17th Century building), at Casa Regis, Italy, curated by L. Mikelle Stanbridge. Using my previous work Fifty Two (2018/19) as a point of departure, I used velvet I brought to the residency interspersed with local bricks. Whereas the original work used one brick for each year of my life and arranged them in a single stack, the expansion utilised one hundred rectangles of velvet, sandwiched between bricks in twenty stacks positioned on the floor, creating a shift from singularity and precarity towards expansion and collectivity. The stacks related to each other while also relating to the proportions, colours and textures of the space.  A human life is measured in a hundred-year span – how short or long a life is lived is often perceived in relation to that figure. Where Fifty Two describes something singular, Fifty Two Expanded addresses broader concepts of shared experiences, adaptation, and connected consciousness.