Between the Eyes - Part 1
Transcript
I’m Richard Deacon. The sculpture in front of you of two steel bulbs linked together by a knuckle with one end sitting on a plinth is a sculpture that I made for this site. The two bulbs are different. One is symmetrical and the other is kind of extruded on one side. The real reason for that is purely to do with to give a kind of narrative and a liveliness between the two parts. And you could say the one that’s the elevated piece that’s up on the stepped plinth is symmetrical, has a kind of stasis to it, but when the second part steps off it becomes more lively or becomes more active. And there is a dialogue between the two. The sculpture itself is joined by something like a tendon or a thread or a trunk, a root, even a ganglia that knots the two parts together. But that connection’s very fluid. It describes a very complex curve as if it were a flexible joint between the two parts.
The sculpture itself is called “Between the Eyes”. And the idea for it developed after my preliminary site visit at which point the site was just a, was an empty lot. I don’t know if they even started breaking ground yet. And there were a couple of things that kind of struck me kind of forcefully at the time. The one was the location at the either the beginning or the terminus of the longest street in Canada, Yonge Street, which goes for two thousand miles as an old fur trading route. And, also across from the square is the departure point for the ferries going out to the islands. So, the site had an implicit kind of focus to it. And the title of the sculpture, “Between the Eyes” is somehow reflected ideas about centrality, about distance travel as you came down Yonge Street with your sled load of beaver furs ready to raise trade.
The sculpture’s huge but I hadn’t wanted to make a huge lump. So that’s why it’s a skeletal structure, to lighten it, to make it something you can look through rather than it always being something you look at. And the seed of the idea was probably as much to do with just some idea about walking as anything else. The sculpture was intended that it looks like it was itinerant on the site. That it had arrived and could depart or was going somewhere or had just arrived from somewhere. And that seemed to be the essence of the place, that it was a point of arrival and departure. 2:59