The Things that Happen When Falling in Love
Shown at: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010)
Installation with 18 coloured and clear acrylic figures with printed mirrored letters, wire cables, 7 video screens, 13 photographs
Dimensions variable
The Things That Happen When Falling in Love brings together suggestions of words, and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces.
Ways of life and labouring die and are reborn elsewhere, as industries such as shipbuilding relocate from the North of England to the West Coast of India. Like on-shore sweethearts bidding farewell to men in sailing ships, the world watches its own histories float away.
Sometimes, only the words for knowing loss and longing remain.
Part sculptural installation, part concrete poetry, part mediation with found footage, The Things That Happen When Falling in Love is, above all, an elegy to the global web of wills and longings that sustain life and love in the face of loss.
In this work, it is this mesh of dispositions that is seen as girding our world, generating strange intimacies across vast distances.
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