10 Feb 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

I have for some years now been creating a series of works composed of toys and other mass-produced cultural artifacts, which could be seen as Joseph Cornell boxes writ large: they are four feet long, three feet tall and between three and six inches deep. What interests me about mass market toys is that because they’re designed to grab kids’ attention as forcefully and quickly as possible they go right to the heart of the way people see the world at a particular time, revealing things about our culture and attitudes which in other contexts are much more modulated.

Sometimes my sculptures are built around a particular persona in pop culture how their images have evolved over time; sometimes they seek to recapture a particular moment like Christmas 1959 or 1919, and many impose a deliberately spurious, quasi-scientific order on the toys by linking them to particular historical eras, like ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire or early America. There are also three dimensional cartoons, imaginary worlds, and more philosophical pieces like ‘The Bluebird of Happiness.’ With engineer John Melzian I’ve recently begun to create electro-mechanically operated tableaux inside cabinets, inspired by the seaside entertainments which fascinated me as a child in places like Bridlington on the east coast of England.

This one was inspired by my love of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.