Water Towers
A collection of works from RE-TURN exhibition.
Watertowers is a series of sculptures created using scraps of copper sheeting coming from the disused water boilers. Copper has become scarce and valuable material: obsolete in domestic infrastructure, but in high demand on the secondary market. Extracted from the earth and highly malleable, its ability to reflect the passage of time on its surface in the form of patina due to oxidisation has made it also attractive to artists. Often subject to theft and vandalism it reflects the social problems endemic in societies with high levels of inequality. The bricolage nature of the Watertowers series captures the contradictory nature of the material and its many different lives in the natural, social and economic networks. Scrappy, incidental and yet purposeful, they remind us that upcycling and repurposing are a way of life for many people in their struggle for economic survival and, at the same time, these strategies are becoming central to our environmental survival too.