Peter Burke

Description

The starting point for Register was Burke's encounter with a newspaper photograph of a silent protest in the Plaza Del Sol in Madrid. A crowd had gathered to register their protest at the capture of Miguel Blanco by ETA. and had filled the square with a forest of raised hands. This formed a link with other photographs in the artist's collection of crowds at concerts and festivals seen from above, and prompted the idea that a show of hands can express a whole range of emotions.

This work acknowledges that industrial mass production and standardisation are inescapable aspects of our culture, and that reproductive technology has been at the heart of sculptural practice since the founding civilisations of Western Culture.

Two thousand cast iron casts of the artist's hand have been industrially produced and assembled in simple, functional storage grids . The quantity of castings are to reflect the method of production and to form a significant presence which could respond with different configurations to a variety of environments.