Starkers
After remaining silent for more than 100 years, Pauline, a nude marble statue and a tribute to Canova’s Venus, has finally opened her eyes to return her visitors’ gaze. Employing a mix of projection mapping, sound and narration “the charming but confrontational statue is a sure fire way to completely reinvent how you think about figurative sculpture. The installation explores the relationship we hold with sculpture from the perspective of the statue. On some levels it is a very well told joke, but on others it is an incredible question to ask of an eternity of gallery goers – a question rarely put to the gallery going public:
Why are we so obsessed with the human form that we’ve become paradoxically indifferent to it?”
(Patrick Kirk-Smith, Art in Liverpool)
Starkers was commissioned by Culture 24 for Museums at Night 2015 at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum. Pauline’s monologue was written by Richard Hurford.