Demeter

This work is part of a series titled Lost Tablets which express a tension between a universally recognisable children’s toy and the grammar of architectural symbols. The works are memorials to the stories of real and fictional ships found crew-less and adrift at sea.

Demeter is named after a fictional ship in the 1897 novel Dracula by author Bram Stoker. As depicted in the book, the Demeter was a Russian sailing vessel found drifting into harbour, the captain dead at the wheel and a cargo of nothing but boxes of earth.

The steamship Iron Mountain, from which this Lost Tablet takes her name, travelled the Mississippi River for a decade until it hit an obstruction and sank in 1882. A body from the

The work is composed of blocks of found Lego which bear the marks left on them by their former owners. Discolouration, writing, dirt, glue, and even teeth marks are evident on the found blocks and romantically embraced in the new object.

The architecture of her sheer face is bound by the tension between the new profile of the tablet, and the varying surface qualities of the found blocks, each with the markings of its own history.

The shapes of the dynamic face are bound together by the tension between the expectation of what a Lego composition would usually prescribe, and the language of an imagined collective architectural unconscious rendering in memory of the ghost ship she mourns.

The strange resonant familiarity of the tablets are designed to oscillate between the platonic, almost primal, recognisability of Lego, and the deeply known, but less frequently described, architectural grammar of the built world.

Each of the works in the series has the same overall dimension and ships with a 25cm diameter round white powder-coated base on which they are magnetically fixed.