Sculpture in the Parklands
2002-2010
Julian Wild (UK)
System #30 is part of a sequentially numbered series of works. I collected pieces of scrap from the site. I saw this process as a kind of archaeology, in which each gear and piece of metal told part of a story of the industrial heritage of the site. Welding these scraps of machinery together, I wanted to hold this collection of objects withing a prevailing ordered form. The disk form lends itself well to the idea of a skimming stone that appears to bounce over the surface of the canal. It is held in the air by the line of trajectory that it leaves behind.
Julian Wild’s System No. 30 is the result of the artist’s gathering scrap like an archaeologist from the Bord na Mona yards nearby. Suggestive of a skipping stone, whose forward trajectory is circumscribed by curvilinear steel bands, System No. 30 alludes to the way fifty years of peat harvesting by Bord na Mona for fuel is like skimming the surface of a far greater, and deeper geological and human history that goes back to the Mesolithic era for us humans, and even farther back in time before we were here, in the Lough Boora Parklands.
John Grande Art/Nature Dialogues
System #30
2009
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