Rodney Glick
Project team: Made Leno,
Dewa Tirtayasa, Wayan Darmadi, Chris Hill
Everyone No.20
Detail
2007 Carved
2009 Painted
Carved and painted wood
46 x 23 x 10cm
The Everyone Project is a series of digital prints, carved wooden and gilded bronzed sculptures highlighting people as 'Gods'. They are portraits of adults and children in everyday western clothes adopting poses that suggest religious characters. All poses were digitally manipulated into one image for each of the four different camera views - front, back, left, and right side. Once the techniques to create the imagery and a photographic suite of poses with different sitters had been developed we then located wood carvers to sculpt the photographic images. We settled on Indonesian wood carvers from the village of Tengulak Ubud on the island of Bali. They began carving eight figures some life size detailed as if they have clothing and with good facial and hand detailing similiar to the photographs.
Fundamental to the Western notion of creativity is the idea of a creative individual as an independent thinker and non conformer. By contrast the idea of newness and rebelliousness is given a low priority in Hindu and Buddhist ideas of creative activity. The formulations of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology do not allow for an understanding of the universe as generating novelty as it moves through time and history. Time is seen as being cyclical a continuum in which history repeats itself thus allowing for no original quality. The quest therefore is to find the non- changing elements in life and to discard those that are impermanent. This also means that for an individual the goal is not to strive for unique achievement but rather to find the ultimate Self, which goes beyond the individualistic ego and connects to all humanity.
Chris Hill, 2008