Machina 2018
Sculpture to be used as a prop in a performance piece. Mild steel and compost. Steel structure 215 x 136 x 42 cm

Digital sketch for the design of Machina. 2048 x 2732 pixels.

Machina was conceived during the last weeks of August 2017. Originally it was a small piece, the size of a large book, that I was intending to build out of the wire I was using at the time to experiment with 3D forms.
 
It is a cage like box designed to have all its sides closed while open at the same time. It also plays with the idea of transparency and permeability.
 
Machina is an absurd machine that pretends to be a useful box, designed to allow the storage and transportation of an amount of soil or dirt. In reality it is a machine that can only produce frustration.
 
This piece is intended to express the feeling of frustration and it was conceived during the summer while I was going through the process of trying to buy a house in Bath and felt frustrated from performing plenty of jobs that didn’t feel like they were really taking me anywhere.

When I decided to make this piece as big as it is now, the idea was that a person would load the cage with a material like dirt or sand and then lift it with the help of a pulley mechanism, into the air. Given the nature of the cage, the soil would remain on the floor while the cage would be lifted into the air, leaving the person with the duty of removing the soil from underneath the cage, bring it back to the floor and load it again only to lift it up once more and find out that the same thing has happened. This action would be repeated continuously until the person felt exhausted.

Due to the lack of a clear space in which to deliver this performance, I finally decided that several people could collaborate in the process of loading the cage with the soil and moving it around, allowing the contents to fall from it and then repeat the process. This could be an absurd task that several people could tackle together, just for the sake of collaborating.

Photographic documentation of a live performance involving Machina at Bath School of Art. 2/3 digital photographs.

Machina is a piece that came up during the last stages of the process though which I went when I bought my house, after deciding to move to Bath to study Fine Art. My Girlfriend, Anne, helped me go through this process and I finally asked her to do the performance with me, as I thought that this would be the most appropriate, given the circumstances.
 
I shot the performance with two cameras, fitted with two wide angle lenses, and from different points of view, both high and low, to accentuate the sensation of movement within the performance.