Site Specific Artist Mehmet Ali Uysal
Pinch 2 2010
Chaudfontaine Park, Belgium
By chance I came across this piece of art work by Mehmet on a google search for site specific art works. Not knowing much about the piece left with me a bit of a task as the information surrounding the art work is very little ad has hindered my ability to give a more detailed breakdown of the artwork.
The art work was one of the first pieces introduced in 2010 as part of the Five seasons Festival, this festival is to promote new art and to keep Chaudfontaine park in a perpetual transformation. Each year a selection of artists from Belgium, and international artists and tasked with creating a masterpiece or installation in situ.
The festival is always providing new works and uses this to remind the audience of the importance of the region’s biodiversity and strives to always preserve this.
Memhet’s works have a theme where he uses flawless illusion to make the viewer believe the art piece being there is the most natural thing about it. We all see a clothes peg holding washing and never question why is that peg there it just registers in are brain that its correct, and I feel when I look at this piece of work, I went with that same connection within the art work. As what else could be there, nothing else would now would simply not make any sense except that peg be positioned where it is within the nature and the natural environment.
The use of the clothespin pinching the upper layer of the earth and lifting its lawn is to represent Gulliver’s travellers and to remind us that we walk on the skin of what is called the planet earth. The piece itself stands at six metre in height creating a fantastic large outdoor sculpture that is so simplistic in design, but in my opinion takes someone with an extremely creative and great imagination to be able to see beyond a mound of dirt in a park and be able to turn it into almost a living part of the environment.
Mehmet’s sculpture links directly to my own work as he has taken an object you see every day; you seem to think it has only one function and wouldn’t normally been seen to have another function except its original purpose. This is the real genius behind this work.
Once you use the object in a completely different way and then scale it to such a large size it already starts becoming something entirely new. This is how I feel now as it helps to invoke new ideas of the meaning of the art work. You may see a peg but you don’t think of it as hanging clothing.