| ZOOM 4 |
ZOOM 4 is the next in series from ZOOM, titled ZOOM 4 because it is a quadriptych.
A semi autobiographical work. The colours are the Newcastle United (The Magpies) football team colours. I identify Newcastle upon Tyne as my home city, I was actually born in Wallsend, a town to the east of Newcastle. The work took just over a year to complete and is composed of over 50,000 matchsticks. I would have liked to mirror the crowd capacity at St James' Park but I fell slightly short.
I was aiming to represent a population, every matchstick to represent a person, it could have been a million or a billion but the philosophy is the same. It is both about anonymity and facelessness. It is every person. The matchstick man is perhaps the most minimal representation of a human. We all contain DNA, minute replicating codes. The closer you look inwards you will find the pattern of a person, the further out from the crowd we all look the same, matchstick people. Leonardo Da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man was a very early influence on me, L S Lowry's matchstick men paintings also represent populations of anonymity (northern anonymity at that).