Marbel Run, part of Slow Art Collectives 'Brunswick Project' Counihan Gallery, June 2011.
Inspired by Rube Goldberg machines and Japanese game show marble runs.
Exploring temporality and the tension of physics and fagility, Marble Run is an engineered platform of stable and unstable environments in which everyday object (traditionally a sphere or cylinder) gains momentum and knocks, pushes, taps, slides and nudges other objects set up in a variety of unstable ways. Materials involved include stationary, knitted nets, stretched plastic, lycra, steal and fishing wire pom poms, jars and crochet covered containers, instruments and gardening equipment erected to connect in temporal haphazard ways. Each connection cause a physical action creating momentum, a reaction that also elicits emotional anxiety and pleasure, tension and beauty. The formality of contrived materials presented in a purpose built way evokes a sense of duality between craft and design, materials and their strength, fagility and tension. Utilising found material the installation creates a static proposition of movement focusing on contemporary materials.
I have been inspired by Rube Goldberg’s machines whose inventions consist of laborious actions that perform simple operations. Marble Run is a mini world of possibility that involves a social environmental project a workshop so participants to build their own run.
