The first thing one must be aware of regarding this work is that it is a work in progress. Like all works in progress it is obviously incomplete and nowhere near what the artist's full vision is of what he wants it to look like when complete. This is not an excuse for any sloppiness in the work; it is an intrinsic part of the installation.
The fact that the piece will be developed in public (so to speak) on the web is also an integral part of its development. Comment and participation from a public will hopefully also be incorporated into its texture. There is no attempt here to be original; the artist simply does not have the resources either in time, talent, intellect, knowledge, skill and most especially money to fully justify an undertaking of this scale at present.
The piece will be added to over the next two years, images and text that form part of the first upload may be changed or deleted as the artist gains more insight into what exactly he is up to. One of the artists' key beliefs is that a work informs an artist about who he is to himself as much as it informs an audience of who he is.
In effect the artist hopes to grow and develop alongside and in tandem with his art of prayer piece. The artist fully expects the work itself to exert a huge influence on its own direction; it has in fact done so already within the first instalment, in its timing and content. The plan had been to examine pagan as well as Christian thought but as events unfolded, and they did unfold by themselves, it became apparent that both of these thought systems needed and indeed expected their own separate modules on the web site. The artist went with the flow. Going with the flow is one of the base principles in the construction of this work and in the artists' life in general.
The work is meant to reflect a little of the content of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which no one can claim to have fully interpreted, certainly not this artist. But the gist of that book is fairly universal. Set in all time everywhere, with a cast of everybody, and with the symbolic setting of Dublin, (doubling inferred), and placed in the dream setting of the Easter Weekend, (a time of ends and beginnings), that work seems to have incorporated all of mankind's comings and goings, up and downs, all of what's good and bad, naughty and sad into one universal family, Finnegan's family. The fall of Finnegan from the magazine wall in the Phoenix Park represents the falls of all of us, along with the Fall of the angels from heaven, the Fall of Titans, cast down by Zeus, the Fall of Adam and Eve, cast out of Paradise by the Supreme Being over an apple, and even Humpty Dumpty's fall off of a wall.
Whether the artists' attempt to explore the myriad of possibilities proffered by such a large canvas ever reach anything like a successful conclusion is not terribly important, the images and "hard" sculptures he creates along the way may or may not work artistically, that is also not too important. What is important to the artist is to busy himself in this project, to see where he leads it or where it leads him, to be engaged in its flow.
The artist is not familiar enough with current "art practice" to know if his work fits in. This undertaking is not about fashion. It's just a modular construct that's based around a single conventional piece of sculpture that the artist made some years ago. Since then the idea has developed, the piece has been made over and over in different media as the concept has grown. Hopefully the idea will continue to engage the artist, and maybe even the public. Hopefully the artist will be up to whatever demands the project throws up at him. He needs most certainly to increase his skills base to incorporate new multimedia practices. He needs a little engagement with the public through showing in galleries, he needs encouragement and resources, but if all or any of the above are not forthcoming then that's ok too because he will have tried his best.
Just lastly to clarify exactly what deficits the artist is working with and how it effects the work, a simple example is the very first segment of the work titled "Breath", the implication of this sequence was meant to be that, simply the act of breathing is an act of prayer. The sequence is meant to show the figures in a kind of elegant dance, moving in and out like a flower opening and closing. But these figures are cast in metal and that's prohibitively expensive so just two figures were photographed and manipulated into the various positions and edited together. The result is hilariously similar to scenes from "The magic roundabout", but then maybe Life itself is just that, a hilarious roundabout, and the piece artofprayer.com is just doing its own thing yet again.
P.S. The environment was cared for during the making of this site.
Other artworks may be viewed at my online show case.