Appropriate For All Ages
Appropriate For All Ages Artist Statement, 2006
“If not you, who else?”
Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
All I have ever cared about is how things work. Robots, locks, computers, people and conversations all come under this heading. Much insistance that I am at heart an engineer has been the rseult, but an aptitude with a soldering iron should be no restriction to fields of curiosity. Reading is as important as doing math and conversation possibly more vital than writing essays. This work is designed to reach people who do not understand or care much about Proper Art – art with impressive credentials guaranteed not to detonate. Art should never be boring. It should be vivid, unpretentious, and a part of our lives. No-one should need five years of education to get it – it must speak on its own merits or be rightly ignored as irrelevant.
Appropriate For All Ages (2006) takes the codified history of art education and decrypts it into motion. The scrapped notes that move inside the case are a reminder that short lives should be full of interest; there is no excuse for boredom. Get out there and make something fascinating.
Practical Description
The Mechanical Hand project Appropriate For All Ages was a thesis developed over the course of nine months at McMaster University. It was built of rescued parts, wood, and string – the idea being that you could see the strings and see how it worked. The play on words in the title is from the term “appropriate” as a verb – to take without permission or consent – and as an adjective, that which is right, fit, or proper. Art is subject to much use of the word in both contexts. The piece is intended to play with the concept of work by-hand, puppetry, and is also a rather bad joke, as the motion of the fingers was triggered by sound in its vicinity. Should someone begin to speak at length nearby, the hand would begin to claw at notes, seeking to find a meaning it could never actually grasp.
The sculpture has been dismantled for want of space.