Icrowsadodecahedron (2010) Large inflatable sculpture incorporating animation, installation exhibited at Bloc Gallery.
Icrowsadodecahedron
The title is a collision: an icosadodecahedron — a geometric solid with thirty edges, twelve pentagonal faces and twenty triangular faces — and a crow. The two shouldn't belong together. That was the point.
This work grew directly from the earlier inflatable sculptures but moved in a new direction, combining the painted geometric form with silhouette film animation for the first time. I was reading widely about crows and ravens at the time — their intelligence, their mythology, their particular quality of watchfulness — and had become fascinated by the crow as a subject. Robert Frost's poem Dust of Snow (1923) was a touchstone:
The way a crow Shook down on me
The dust of snow From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart A change of mood
And saved some part Of a day I had rued.
Something dark intervening unexpectedly and making the day bearable. The crow as an agent of small, sudden transformation.
In the animation, a crow flies in through bare branches, lands, and calls three times. Then it begins again. The loop is deliberate — a repeated pattern, a ritual, something witnessed over and over. The animation was projected onto the surface of the inflatable using early projection mapping techniques, and alternatively directly onto the gallery wall - so the crow inhabits the geometry of the form, moving across its faces and edges as though the mathematical structure were a forest of its own.
Shown at Bloc Gallery, Sheffield.
