The Carpet Man project began in autumn of 2011. A few months before the start of The Art Of Failure Isn't Hard To Master at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda I had this stray thought, which lead to something more concrete as the date of the opening approached. More than ten years ago I had spent a few nights rolled up in an old piece of carpet sleeping on my studio floor, this in many ways was the start of the incubating process for this work.
I am intrigued by what happens when you take art out of the gallery space and bring it to an unexpected place. You take it out of its box and see what you can do with it, where you can bring it to. That is what is currently happening with the Carpet Man project. It came out of an unexpected moment, an unconventional, almost absurd thought that eventually lead to something more tangible. There is something of the anonymous anti-hero about Carpet Man that is a counterpoint to the world of multi million pound superhero blockbusters that fill the cinema screens at the moment and he is going to these dilapidated, destroyed, abandoned, flawed, failed places and it makes him look vulnerable. This is after-the-boom-Ireland-recession, a touch of last day of the earth scenario, like in Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. Carpet Man is passing through a world we are not very well equipped for, a world that is not ours.
By bringing Carpet Man to these places, he is asking, what have we done to these places, what have we done to ourselves, why have we allowed this to happen, how could we have been so wasteful. When I go to these abandoned places I often feel there is something unreal about them, they seem like stage sets, not just because that’s what they end up being in a way on the photographs and on film - I don’t want to sound gloomy, but it’s as if we get a glimpse of what it will look like when we are gone, when nature has outlived us.
The Carpet Man project could not exist without the help of others. I would like to mention in particular Jozef V.VODA, Liam McGrath, Oliver Fallen, Christodoulos Makris, Des Hamilton, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Dave West & Denny Collins - a heartfelt thank you to you all.
I am intrigued by what happens when you take art out of the gallery space and bring it to an unexpected place. You take it out of its box and see what you can do with it, where you can bring it to. That is what is currently happening with the Carpet Man project. It came out of an unexpected moment, an unconventional, almost absurd thought that eventually lead to something more tangible. There is something of the anonymous anti-hero about Carpet Man that is a counterpoint to the world of multi million pound superhero blockbusters that fill the cinema screens at the moment and he is going to these dilapidated, destroyed, abandoned, flawed, failed places and it makes him look vulnerable. This is after-the-boom-Ireland-recession, a touch of last day of the earth scenario, like in Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. Carpet Man is passing through a world we are not very well equipped for, a world that is not ours.
By bringing Carpet Man to these places, he is asking, what have we done to these places, what have we done to ourselves, why have we allowed this to happen, how could we have been so wasteful. When I go to these abandoned places I often feel there is something unreal about them, they seem like stage sets, not just because that’s what they end up being in a way on the photographs and on film - I don’t want to sound gloomy, but it’s as if we get a glimpse of what it will look like when we are gone, when nature has outlived us.
The Carpet Man project could not exist without the help of others. I would like to mention in particular Jozef V.VODA, Liam McGrath, Oliver Fallen, Christodoulos Makris, Des Hamilton, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Dave West & Denny Collins - a heartfelt thank you to you all.
As part of the The Road Is Paved With Good Intentions exhibition at Droichead Arts Centre (Jan. 2015), Carpet Man and writer Christdodoulos Makris (http://yesbutisitpoetry.blogspot.ie/) collaborated on a performance/reading on opening night. Both were responding to various discarded material used in the gallery installation with treatments of contemporary cultural detritus.
