Eddie Farrell - Artist

Satement

Eddie Farrell is a sculptor who uses society’s discards as a medium to create site-specific installations that look to emphasise the various histories or potentials that are latent in space, buildings, institutions, etc. The artistic process, he claims, is one of reactivating and energising spaces, and so generating discussion and awareness through this very process.

“My firm belief in a free and balanced education for all has lead me to question the role of the media in helping to shape, and perhaps control contemporary society.

“They who put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.”

“I work with everyday detritus (junk mail, packaging, yesterdays newspapers), for site-specific installations, often in connection with particular institutions, or historical places.

“My most recent project is a piece I made in reaction to the war with Iraq: I covered the floor , walls and ceiling of an entire room with war-related newspaper pages, and so identified a bunker-like zone for reflection and conversation. I also scheduled a number of discussions for people to come in and participate in. This project is exemplary of my developing strategy:

• Identify a space.
• Energise it through an artistic process.
• Reinstate it into the world as a changed space.

“For this project, I intend to extend a line of research I have recently undertaken into the Foundling Hospital at Corium’s Fields in Camden. This was an institution that took in orphans and unwanted children in the capital from the 1740s onwards.

“Since discovering the plaque of the old boundary line of the Foundling Hospital, I’ve been drawn to the energy and presence generated over that particular stretch of pavement. I have been working with this space, taking casts of the shape and the surface of the area. My plan is to find a similar historical site in Belgrade, and to take elements of each institution to the site of the other, in a bid to also trigger an exchange of cultural information and experience; a reinstatement of space that acknowledges and highlights history and offers up new possibilities for the future.”