My artist review

The artist that I choose is: Rob Mulholland

This is a artist that works mostly with sculptures. What he does is creating a “reflection” for the people who are seeing his work. The project that I choose from him is about reflection. He has created forms of returning soldiers from world war one. Like sculpture that are higher than 2 meter. But the most extraordinary thing about his work is that they are polished so that they reflect like a mirror. You won’t see them immediately but when you move around them you notice a little shift in the pattern that is the forest. This art project was funded by Red Bee Media Ltd. Together with the BBC they asked him to make a group of sculptures to use in their trailer and as art from/memorial for the war.

What you see back in this work is not only the creation of the form of a soldier but also that one soldier whit different colour patterns (if you move the perspective on which you look at it). It gives you the felling of a presents person, while there is none. It reflects what these soldiers have done for you. Like they say in the trailer:” We can’t shake their hand, we can’t look them in the eye. But we can remember…”.

If you stand and look at your own reflection in those sculptures you begin to think about that time and maybe even how good it is now. They have fought for you so you can live in peace and freedom.

In a similar work, he did earlier he placed 2-meter-high mirrored steel figures of people on the streets of Alloa town. These sculptures were dented which deformed the image you see if you stand in front of this sculpture you wouldn’t see the normal reflection you would normally see but a new reality. It invites the people there to look at their surroundings in a new way.

With these sculptures, he creates a new reality. It lets you stop and think. It doesn’t matter if he placed them in a residence area or a place in a forest where all the trees have been cut down. It sends a message to look around. Think what you are doing there. Stand still and look at your own reflection, and move and see everything around you from a different perspective.

The context is pretty clear. He wants you to look up and around. He places his mirror sculptures in different places to let you see the place/problem from a different perspective.

It is very artistic I the way it doesn’t belong in the places it is put but one way or the other it feels like it belongs there. Because of the reflection it goes all up in its surrounding. Also with the variation of dented sculptures he constantly differs in his concept and story he wants to tell.

These sculptures also participate on a social level, it creates awareness of the place where it stands. (like the floating one the floats above a piece of forest were all the trees have been cut down.) it participates in the awareness of these problems or historical events. It lets people think.

The project is practically changing reality, It deforms space on the location it is presented. So it transforms the location in which you have to look twice to see what it is representing and what is reality and just a reflection.

My personal vision on his work is that I find it inspiriting how he manage to create an art piece that really get you thinking about the place where it is present. By being so unlikely to be there people get intrigued by its presents and what it is for. By the use of a reflection you get that you look at yourself and your surroundings in another way. Like the mirrored figure in the forest. It shows you the devastation of the hand of humans to nature. and by seeing that and yourself together in the reflection it really gets you thinking. And wondering how it has come this far. He uses this aspect with every mirrored work in different places to create the same effect of a variation of problems.

http://www.robmulholland.co.uk/bbc-first-world-war-commission/4587576371

The cool aspect about this work you can see in this pictures. While the sculptures become almost a part of the forest, you still can see the outline of them so that there are persons. Also they give a bit of peace because they don’t move and reflect there surrounding. It is almost like if there surrounding is fine they will be fine.

In this trailer they made with these art pieces you really notice that every sculpture has his own story to tell. You notice in this trailer that the variation of reflection make it look like real army man and create different settings for them to be in. like a sort of timeline.

This artist make his work in charge of companies or just by himself. This means he is not making anything whit the people from society. He creates the work to inspire people and let people thing about their current view of our world. He is not out to topple governments or change the parlement. He just wants people to watch and maybe change a little bit in their own situation to make a better world. He literally and figural gives them a mirror. It is auto-relational.