Plasticine Installations
© Frankie Sinclair 2004

Size: up to a couple of metres wide and very very heavy.
Materials: plasticine hammered onto board.

'Black and White Issue' and 'Coloured Vision'

Low-fi interactive pictures. At the start they looked like perfect abstract paintings with a beautiful texture. But gallery visitors were allowed to touch them and change them. After a while they were transformed into 3d graffiti. At one show, some students attacked the pictures with chisels and knives. People carved in their initials, buried coins, wrote political messages or just destroyed what others had done.

The first one of these installations was built for the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London as part of the annual exhibition of East End artists called 'The Whitechapel Open'.

I was interested in phrases like 'the melting pot' and 'collective voice' and the whole thing about living in a multi-cultural city. Does anyone agree on anything? I just imagined all these voices shouting to be heard. There's all this striving and struggle and fight to retain identity and fit in at the same time.

The peice was also a bit of a reaction against interactive computer screens. I liked the idea that you could get physical in a way that you can't with screen that can only be lightly touched or clicked on (not that I'm against technology - I love it).

Both these works were featured in

"Young British Art: The Saatchi Decade" published 1999 Booth-Clibborn Editions

This book was a selection from documentation of a decade of Charles Saatchi's famous art collection.