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The Metre
2011
Solid cast bronze sculpture
100 x 5 x 3cm
This project has been supported by Arts Victoria
At its conception the metre was an impossible means to measure space and time, the 'mètre étalon' is here transformed into a solid bronze sculpture. The cast was made from a piece of petrified timber that I found by chance in my back garden. While the piece of wood hds heavily decayed, it was scored with a series of fine lines at regular intervals of six centimetres. There was no explantation for this ruler that I could find. Its measure was as arbitrary as the metre itself. It made sense therefore to meld this object with a poetic past, so I turned the stick into a copy of one of the first standard rulersto be commissioned by the French republic.
Looking at the 1799 prototype of É́tienne Lenoir, I reproduced the original words 'MODEL' and 'METRE' as they had been engraved on the early brass measure. In my mind, the sculpture embodies the decay of all material objects and the impossibility of standard time measurement. In another way, as a material, bronze harks back to the tools of the ancients. Displayed low to the floor, it emerges from the ground, as the rotting stick arose from the soil in my garden.
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