The Who of the I: Exhibition, Public Art Work

The Who of the I Public Artwork and Artist’s Residency was commissioned and funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire Artspace and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

I was offered an artist’s residency to work on the commission for a large-scale 30 metre long artwork to be permanently installed on the outside façade of the Yorkshire Artspace studio complex in the Cultural Industries Quarter of Sheffield city centre. The work consists of 24 images of specially created sculptures and three poetic texts.

The work is intended to be a creative research exploration of the self-reflective nature of the creative process and consists of a series of iconic figurines representative of varying artistic self-images. The central research premise of the work is that an artist working alone is always effectively haunted by or collaborating with a host of influential cultural figures from the cultural past and present.

The work’s essential theoretical impetus was provoked by two historical texts, one referring to the creative need to make objects of self-development and identification, the other referring to the common creative self-reflective phenomenon of the multiple creative personas