Inflate/Deflate

‘Inflate deflate’ is a light sensitive sculpture linked by feedback to the surrounding environment and selected through peer review the award of a solo exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. The exhibition took place in the University Gallery as part of a collaborative initiative by the Global Sustainability Institute, the Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University and the artist to raise awareness of discussions related to sustainability.

The aims of the work:
• To produce artwork critically engaging discourses of sustainability.
• To practically explore how art can play a role as a dissenting practice that embodies contradictions within the discourse.
• To extend discussions of fine art’s role within a contexts of ecological crises and change.
• To test methods which foreground the comic and impotence typically overlooked in the field and to critically engage assumptions embodied in the ignorance of such methods.
• To extend discussions to suggest discourses beyond solution-driven foci.
• To draw upon discussions from outside the discipline (including minor literature (Deleuze & Guattari 1994), art as encounter (O’Sullivan 2010), negativism (Toscano 2011), the philistine (Beech, 2002) and the jester (Fisher 2010) to explore how these ideas can be exploited as a critique critically testing and broadening the discipline.

‘Inflate deflate’ comprises inflatable letters spelling ‘sustainable’. Solar panels trickle charge leisure batteries which power fans to inflate the sculpture; the inflation and deflation of the work is dependent on the amount of sunlight available daily. Viewers only fleetingly experience the inflated work and predominately encounter the work collapsed. Deflation foregrounds the apparent failure of the sculpture and its technologies. The work’s materiality performs problems identified with unsustainable living; the work was manufactured in Hong Kong and shipped to the UK. Perceived flaws catalyse discourses of failure, success and problem solving.

• http://www.campzero.org.uk/andy-websters...