Mick McGraw
'Pollphail Village, Portavadie, Argyll'

The site of the completed boxing clever project is now online. Its good to see the work of others, and see how they dealt with the proposition. Naturally the results are varied, and the artists that I know broadly behaved as you'd expect them to. I particularly enjoyed the light touch of both Tom Sowden and Savage; the straight concept delivery of Sarah Bodman's bookshelf and Douglas Hollely; and the very different poetic sensibilities of Cecilia Mandrile and Mick McGraw.

Tom Sowden
'Ashtray'

For my own part, I gave the liberty to the photographer to arrange photograph it how they saw fit. I imagined a similar fallen megalith look, but I'd always put the head of the figure upon its shoulders. I guess should have made that explicit, but obvious differences in interpretation that that makes does not cloud the basic elements and poetry.

Part of the piece, for me, is in the rather catholic and punative process of building these poor objects. They are quite difficult to construct and the title in part comes from the sense of demanding labour that is in the building process as well as the almost metaphysical transformation that happens in going from 2D to 3D. In that sense the project only started to make sense when I started to draw the 2D-3D element as part of the piece in terms of the process á la Abbott's Flatland, of which the book is really only a concise C19th. instance of the concept and the trace metaphor is rooted much deeper within Christian and Platonic history. This braided with my usual themes very neatly, but added another dimension (heh), creating the final work.