Under One Beat

In april I was approached by the Vancouver childrens Festival to create an interactive sculpture/installation. I had no idea what I would do but I accepted anyway.

At the time I was busy finishing the first year of the Masters of applied arts program at ECUAD. Because of that I didn't even think about the project righht away. A few weeks later on a trip to the Freida Diesing school of Northwest Coast art (I helped fascilitate a drummaking workshop and did a talk about my practice), I came up with an idea.

in my moleskine journal I drew a rough sketch.

Three wooden box drums on a metal base, the drums would face in towards each other and on the outside of each drum would be an archived image of an aboriginal in Vancouver over the last 125 years(the projects funding came from the Vancouver 125 fund).

My plan was to build the box drums myself and commission out the base to a metal worker. Unfortunately I had issues with the metal base and decided a wooden base would be more than sufficiant.

I had another project starting in the middle of May, so I needed a helper who was able to do some light labour work and have some scanning/photo skills. Perfectly suited to the task was my classmate and Newcastle supporter Adam Stenhouse. I managed to get the artwork done 2 days before my deadline (not bad).

Under One Beat, is based on the idea of one drum, in a traditional Nisga'a dance group the idea is to get all the drums to sound like one drum, its about unity. The archived images add another element, I think of the installation as honouring the past.