Esme Monk

Sculptures of the Street

I graduated with a Fine Art degree last year, but over these last 7 months I have been struggling to hold onto anything that made me still feel like an artist. I moved out of my parents’ place and was naturally forced into full time employment to pay my bills. Unfortunately, like for many others, Covid meant that I lost all of my art related opportunities and so my post-graduate life is much different from expected.

I am a sculpture and installation artist who specialises in the use of readymade object elements in my work. I am fascinated with the consumer culture of our ever quickening modern world and how globalisation and easy consumerism has affected our view and value of things. The discarding of objects is guilt free as everything is so accessible and cheap. As a result, the turnover of objects in our world is shocking.

These last couple of months my studio has been the streets during my commute to work, where I became fascinated by the “found sculptures” I often saw. Discarded singular or clumped objects, untouched and left in the middle of the path or road, overlooked by passers by. As rubbish of the streets, these “sculptures” are often untouched for days. Hundreds of passers by acknowledge them and then forget them just as quickly, claiming no reasonability or passing thought to these objects seen on a daily basis. Using my phone to document means people can slow down and acknowledge discarded objects in a different light, hopefully provoking thought.

I have learned not to feel pressured in my job aspirations or personal artistic practice, art doesn’t mean just creating, it can be thinking, discovering or reading. For me, the small time spent walking the streets has been just as inspiring and creative as time in a studio.

Books of Interest:

Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman – Looking at the modern ever quickening world
Flows and Counterflows Globalisation in Contemporary Art by Marcus Verhagen – Artists work on Globalisation
The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman – Globalisation and consumerism changing throughout the centuries