‘Our relationship
to objects of command, and our approach to touching them, is constantly
evolving: the low-relief of buttons is disappearing entirely with the arrival
of the touch-screen.
I wanted to explore
this sculptural evolution by proposing organic metaphors and juxtapositions
using the concept of ‘the remote control’as a starting
point: to question how we organise the perception of our world through touch
and indeed by whom and what we are ourselves controlled.’
Though Marian Fountain has resided in Europe for over twenty years, her
presence in the New Zealand art scene, exhibiting here every four to five years
since 1989, has been an important factor in the development in her artistic
practice. Fountain’s pacific origins inform much of her sculpture. Throughout her
career, she has excavated imagery from a range of cultures. Maori iconography
has featured prominently in her work, and the classical traditions of
sculpture, which stretches back to antiquity, is always present in her process.
Encountering the concept of a remote control from an archeological standpoint,
the remote possesses the characteristics of a talisman. When held and touched,
it has the ability to control other things; it is a vehicle for change and an
object of power.
In his article in
Art New Zealand, Mark Stocker compares Fountain’s latest series of sculpture to
rakau whakapapa, staves that serve as a mnemonic aid to Maori elders reciting
long genealogical histories. Like the rakau, sculpture
is linked explicitly to the sense of touch, and the tactile nature of the
medium adds to the experience of the work. We also experience a remote control
largely through touch. Often we are not looking at the remote when we use it,
instead we run our sensitive fingertips across buttons as we look ahead,
heightening the experience of the remote as a three dimensional object. Its
bumps and buttons, all with a specific purpose, we read like a Maori elder
reads the notches of the rakau. The metamorphic quality of the sculptures bridges
time, informing us at once of our present and our distant ancestral past,
emphasizing that the present is but a notch in time.
