sculptural preferences

["Bill Urmenyi" <bill@zzzzzzzzzzzzz>]

Dear Norman

It seems to me that there is a point to be made about large works that does
not appear to have been made yet.

It is not so much the size of the object that is important, it is the space
that it occupies. You can fill a very large space with a relatively small
object. Now as it happens I have never worked in stone and I'm only on the
list because my wife does.

I give, as an example of this, a piece I made for a show in Queens Wood in
Highgate (London). Now this show is basically a piss-up for artists. Once a
year about 50 artists descend on the woods on a Saturday morning. They
install their work in the woods, have a party in the evening and come back
the following day and take it all away again. I made a work which was small
and deliberately hidden from sight, yet filled a huge area. There is a
disused children's paddling pool almost surrounded by a Y shaped path. A
movement detector was placed at the junction of the path. When you moved,
you heard the sound of children playing in a paddling pool projected from
the undergrowth on the other side of pool. So the only thing that could be
seen was the pool. This can be seen at http://www.urmenyi.co.uk on the
gallery page.

Now as for large scale not being particularly friendly (possibly not quite
the right word but I'm hoping that it encompasses a large range of feelings
about the large) I would point to a few works. The sun in the Tate Modern,
angel of the north, and the enormous recent work by Anish Kapoor which also
filled the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. The sun, although it is not a
particularly small work, does fill a very much larger space.

Bill Urmenyi