THE LOST MARBLES
Photographs 2016
What began as a statement about a feeling of the impotence of the individual citizen in political affairs developed into a multi- faceted metaphor for Brexit. Close-up photographs of statues from the Parthenon Friezes in the British Museum strip the marble forms of their context and focus upon areas of damage or mutilation. As the Brexit debate unfolded, the works resonated with the macho rhetoric of the discussion and issues of repressive Imperial British propriety, cultural displacement, national identity and nationalist propaganda. The origins of the statues’ damage are undocumented: while the statues may have sustained their injuries in their migration from Athens to London, others speculate they were deliberately vandalised for the sake of ‘modesty’, as has been recorded in other cases to make the bodies conform to British sensibilities of the time.