HIDE. Performance Installation for the Secret Garden Party in 2017, the end of an era, I had 12 stitches in my face from building this thing. The scars still there. Some cheeky scamps did balloons all over my art, and getting a mariarchi band to play pop song covers Mexican style at midnight on a Sunday is one of my favourite contributions to the universe thus far.
This is what I told them would happen:
In Christopher Nolan’s 2015 epic Interstellar Matthew McConaughey can be seen passing through the shuttle Endurance as it departs earth, giving reassurance to fellow astronaut Romilly by passing him a pair of headphones. The audio track fades up and the reassurance given is a field recording of a rain and birdsong, a storm on earth. More recently academic and motor mechanic Matthew Crawford author of The World Beyond Your Head, “a kind of philosophical treatise on how to cope with modernity”, talks of how we are losing our ability to focus in a world of distraction where silence, has become a form of luxury commodity, restricted to places like the business class lounges of airports or train stations. HIDE takes these two issues and invites End of the Road Festival goers to just be where they are for a minute: somewhere on the edge of a field, in Dorset.
FIELD_GUIDE_HIDE is a two-panel structure with two additional smaller wings. The two main panels, each constructed of 3 8’x4’ ply sheets, are dissected by small window slits with little doors such as you find in RSPB or Wildlife Trust bird hides. The doors can be opened or closed as the festival goers choose. These two panels are decorated with a collage made up of pages from numerous field guides identifying birdlife, wildlife and the flora of the British Isles. The two smaller wings are painted in blackboard paint.
FIELD_GUIDE_HIDE comes with a number of pairs of binoculars chained in place so that festival goers can look out onto the great beyond of Hardy country and the dorsetshire hills. The lumps of chalk, collected from the nearby Jurrasic coast enable festival goers to adorn the HIDE’s wings with notes on what they saw, who they were with, philosophical musings or the more traditional woz ‘ere’s.