The Air Loom

Air Loom is a large sculpture commissioned and exhibited at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne as part of a larger exhibition All you need to know curated by Andrew Patrizio, (which included Lucy Orta, Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, Marko Peljhan, Sarah Tripp). sculpture was a life size representation of a room-sized 18th Century machine that was based on a series of delusions of a famous bedlam patient dating from 1810. patient believed that the imaginary machine was a mind control Drawing on extensive archive research and using original drawings and documents the sculpture is the first ever physical manifestation of the imaginary device. Constructed in painstaking detail the sculpture used many of the tropes of popular historical representations to interrogate ideas of authenticity and historical veracity. exhibition was reviewed in Frieze magazine by Neil Mullholland, March 2003, and in Art Monthly, by Paul Usherwood, Dec 2002 - Jan 2003. The sculpture was rebuilt and reassembled for The Air Loom and other Dangerous Influencing Machines, held at the Prinzhorn Institute and galleries, Heidelberg, Germany, 26 October 2006 - 15 April 2007. work was featured in the catalogue, edited by Thomas Roeske, 2006.