The vise was purchased at a local farmers auction for 4 quid, ten times less than it's value in steel by weight. Not being able to come into possession of steel by collecting, foraging, scavenging, I bought it. Though I was certain I didn't need already formed steel in the shape of a vise that didn't work, I was happy to rest it in the garden and watch. I watched for 2 years how the air and weather stripped it of its black enamel. I tended it, each time it fell off its precarious perch on the edge of a stone wall. I even apologized for it when it nearly broke the leg of Mack while he was digging around it.
An artist feels when its time. Eventually a moment comes, and one task is to condition ourselves to recognize it and be prepared to execute immediately upon it. I knew that I couldn't, and didn't want to, work the vice as I have been doing with steel previous, that is, considering it as clay and carving it; witnessing and observing it as liquid. This steel already had a most beautiful form, my job was simply to make it speak...more.
So it was quickly taken down and propped upright. I have said somewhere before that sometimes sculpture is nothing more that a nice shape propped upright...Propped Up Right. This piece is, in a way, an attempt to illustrate this. My time was spent on force feeding the vise to itself in order to express an idea. The vise is consuming itself not unlike we are. The real work was in the relationship between the 'arm' and 'jaw' of the vice. Because the piece is hefty, tough, industrial, I was aiming for delicacy with regard to its self consumption. It is 'about' to bite itself. I thought that if the vice was actually chomping down on its own arm the idea becomes to literal, too obvious. This negative image hopefully helps to better visualize this 'problem' or riddle, as I put it to myself. The arm and its relation to the 'bottle' shape of the negative space between the uprights of the vice is provocative.
It is a snake eating its tail; my friend Zoe said, 'I don't care what you call it, it's an Ouroboros'. It is a child eating PEZ, or an adolescent popping ecstasy, or maybe an adult, faithfully swallowing prozac. It is innuendo.
