Passage 1995
Plasterboard, wood, plaster, chipboard, light 15 x 15 x 8 ft
Passage is a ‘building within a building’ that was constructed in the basement of the Mackintosh building at Glasgow School of Art. At first sight, the work looks like an unfinished project – freshly plastered and unpainted. Consisting of a series of enclosed passageways, the structure is a dark maze that has been sliced through diagonally to let in reflected daylight. Catching the edges of the exposed plaster, the light draws huge parallelogram ‘doorways’ that disorientate the viewer more the further they enter and the darker it becomes. The bare plaster changes the acoustics and smell of the space, heightening the senses, but believing their eyes before their heightened senses of hearing and touch, people literally walk into walls.
On reaching the back of the space, the light hits the wall as the ‘gable end’ of an image – here the viewer can look back through the work to the source of light. Functioning as a giant camera obscura, a metaphor for the cranium, or a ‘sensing space’, the work places the participant at once in a position of power and vulnerability. It is never possible to see the ‘wall of light’ all at once, only to experience it in parts, completing the sculpture through the haptic senses and in the mind.
