TACTICAL A.U.

ASSEMBLY - New Work

 

We are all parts on the Sprue of life....

 

As a child in the 1960’s and 70’s I had an abiding fascination with war and war stories. This fascination found an outlet in model making - planes, tanks and toy soldiers. At the time, this abstractly violent preoccupation did not seem unusual, even for a quiet and introverted child such as myself.

 

As I entered my teens my shyness and inability to communicate led to a more focused attention on my model building, with hours and days spent in my bedroom focused on the small worlds and characters I put together with glue and paint. 

 

My world became very small…

 

It was only a chance collision with Punk that a door opened for me and I found a way out (or so I thought).

 

It would be another 20 years before I felt tempted to to return to the modeling table and another 10 before I realised that my fascination and addiction to this small form of recreational hobby activity had another name - Depression….

 

All those hours and days wasted.

 

All that attention to detail - wasted.

 

All that potential energy - wasted.

 

All that time spent alone with myself - with the only thing I felt able to control - the small world of the plastic modeler….

 

With ASSEMBLY, I will take a small group of people on a journey - a journey into the small - a place where we have ultimate control - a place where we are Gods of creation and destruction.

 

I envisage creating a model workshop where the audience each makes their own plastic model; and through the process of building and talking with others in the group and the onlookers passing through, learn something about themselves and their fellow modelers. At the end of the performance they can chose to keep or destroy their creation in a mass battle of burning plastic and pyrotechnic chaos….