Statement
Welcome To The Third Millennium
The coming of the third millennium was much heralded by the media, politicians and others as a great new beginning, a new opportunity for change and for mankind to make the world a better and more peaceful place. The world did change, dramatically but not as predicted. Humanity appeared to suffer some kind of radical inversion and the hoped-for future evaporated into a vision of destruction, violence and a regrouping of ideologies, set against a background of a planet no longer able to support the life which inhabits it.History demonstrates that basic human instincts change little over time. We are all prisoners of our genes and our genes selfishly want us to survive and procreate at all costs in order that they can survive, which in turn can mean exploiting, repressing or destroying others in order so to do.
This body work is a quest to reflect the world as I see it and an attempt to make some kind of personal sense of humanity's seeming obsession with self-destruction and its ability to revert to the basest of it's instincts.
I see this installation as being, in some way, like a theatrical black comedy. The Court offers a defined stage-like space where the decaying, rusting figures interact and physically create time/space relationships, be they philosopher or warrior, tormentor or tormented, lover or onlooker, they all bring into play their personal and universal histories, cultures and prejudices. All are implicated, both as victims and perpetrators, in the destruction of the civilised values they claim to support.
The action revolves around the almost poetic stillness of the figures which is ruptured by the actions of The Dissident who wants change and will not let things be. Is he a terrorist and a destroyer or the result of some kind of Darwinesque evolutionary force pushing humanity into tomorrow, whatever the cost? Welcome to the Third Millennium.
Mike Roles 2007
The sculptures are fabricated in GRP, resin and metal. However, the work is suitable for casting in iron and bronze.