Four Stacks, 2024
Archival pigment prints | 60 x 90cm framed
Washed into cracks and caves punctuating the cliffs, this man-made, maritime detritus speckled the harsh, slate grey rocks with spots of colour. Perhaps it was that contrast that first drew the duo to collecting the abandoned globes. The artists took a hammer onto the beach, and an aluminium ladder to reach plastic lodged high in the cliff. Over the course of a year, they gathered 51 trawl floats as well as bags of unevenly shaped plastic shards.
Each piece was distinguished by a single synthetic colour – red, green, white, yellow. Sizes also varied and within the serial attitude of Modernism, a cultural idiom that utilises elemental qualities of line, colour, repetition and surface, their sculptural potential was strong. The bright plastic jetsam suggested lightness, movement and travel, even gaiety – blameless but invasive gatecrashers on nature.
The result was a series titled Four Stacks. Floats were assembled into columns in the rocky coves they had drifted into on tides. The vertical composition has no arcane colour coding; the order is as random as mankind can make it. Threaded onto 2.6m steel poles, the stacks appear both in strange harmony with their surroundings and as disjointed presences. They are both part and apart from their surroundings. Martin Holman