With this installation I have created a contemporary Garden of Eden based on an Albrecht Dürer etching entitled Creation of Adam and Eve (1504). Dürers' image and its interpretation of morality and responsibility raise many questions for me that are both contradictory and at odds with my own view of life and so my 3D installation finds a space ship crashing into the garden of Eden with spaceboy, spacegirl and reworked representations of the four humors in skeletal form.
This installation allows me to explore a rich array of themes about contemporary life, religious faith and personal responsibility as well as corporate capitalism and our new morality. It explores the relationship between science and faith and the conflict that exposes, as well as exploring myth, metaphor and narrative on multiple levels. It carries ultimately a message, which is a warning and a question, one that can be read as either a positive or a negative. Hopefully it allows pause for thought at least.
The setting of the shop asks the viewer to draw clear comparisons between religious original sin and the very recent banking crisis/crash and the subsequent recession that has produced the empty shop that houses the installation. It asks us to question our own sense of judgment about “greedy” financial houses and make a clearer comparison to our own needs to satiate personal consumer driven appetites. It also questions personal responsibility in how we recover from this position long term.
I have tried to examine the conflict that arises when a society is compromised by having such gulfs between its founding principles, its personal moralities, its desires and their consequences as well as our need for an omnipotent figurehead to blame in a crisis or to save us from ourselves. [photographs ewen weatherspoon]
