Going Nowhere 1.5
The third in a trilogy of works, Going Nowhere 1.5 shows a figure that seems lost in an absurd quest. A small sand-island in the North Sea is filmed from a drone as the tide gradually eats away at its coast. The tiny figure of the artist walks purposely around its edge, spiralling inwards as the water rises. The island finally becomes a dot of dry sand before eventually vanishing beneath the waves. The figure is gone.
While the work may directly refer to the very real prospect of rising waters and present the solitary figure’s pacing as an absurd and doomed act, it could also be read against the background of Faithfull’s pursuit of exploration and wonder.
“I think of my practice as a kind of ‘geo-poetics’. My work looks at the planet we find ourselves
on as a kind of fragile sculpture to be explored, to be measured and to be felt. I try to set the unimaginable scale of this planet against the local scale of the landscape around us – using my body in films and photos either as a kind of measuring stick, or to act out impossible dreams and visions from unknown futures”.
About the artist
Simon Faithfull
My practice has been described as an attempt to understand and explore the planet as a sculptural object – to test its limits, to sense its processes and to report back on how it feels. Recent works have pictured human-kind’s fragile position on this ball of rock and have explored our entangled interdependence with our fellow ‘Earthlings’ – the trillion other species, the gasses and the rocks that we share this planet with, and that we humans tend to call ‘nature’. Within my work I often travel to new contexts and learn from people, scientists, and technicians that help me bring back a personal vision from the ends of the world.
Recent projects include a body of work made in a watery, modernist ruin found off the coast of Florida; a journey across Europe and Africa tracing the 0º Greenwich Meridian; a live video-transmission from the deliberate sinking of a ship to create an artificial reef and a film featuring the artist walking the perimeter of a shrinking island. Other older projects include a video-work recording the journey of a domestic chair as it is carried to the edge of space beneath a weather balloon and a drawing project sending back live digital-drawings from a two-month journey to Antarctica.