Words Fail
2011
15 x carved Carrara marble letters

Installation dimensions variable

“Joe Sheehan is as interested in words and their conceptual purchase as he is in the artworks he produces; vitally aware of the significance of attaching names to things, and vice versa. Record combines objects as records with the notion of embodied knowledge and information.
…
The pivotal work in the exhibition is a series of fifteen balloon letters carved from Carrara marble: a ‘response’ to Sheehan’s Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship in November 2011. The bubble letters are called Words Fail, a witty response to an inability to communicate such a monumental experience, couched with further irony in the medium of monuments themselves. These letters are about awe, and the limits of our capacity to convey it; words with lofty intentions that have fallen on stony ground.”
Record exhibition media release by Dr. Billie Lythberg >






Photos: Kallan MacLeod

Tim Melville Gallery