The Living Museum (2020)
A series of woodcut and linocut prints made in response to the removal of public works of art by Jason deCaires Taylor on the island of Lanzarote in 2019. The translation of these images from social media documents into one-off prints provided the basis for my MA dissertation: Towards a Living Museum: how does the ‘Manrique model’ effect our experience of place on the island of Lanzarote?
The Rising Tide by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor was installed at the island’s capital port in 2016 whilst deCaires Taylor was creating Europe’s first underwater museum, Museo Atlantico, at the south of the island. The government removed the sculptures a few years later, giving reason that it did not fit with the image of the island’s native artist and environmentalist, Cesar Manrique. Despite being an admirer of Manrique’s work and what he managed to achieve as an artist and environmentalist in Lanzarote, I have been fascinated by the curious and potentially damaging notion of utopia that has been potentially misconstrued and hijacked by the government in order to preserve heritage in the name of tourism.
The arena where memory, ecology, motherhood and landscapes of the Anthropocene coincide provides a tangible insight into why Manrique’s art – and equally why the removal of deCaires Taylor’s work – in the public realm, has made such impact on my life and continued to be a rich source for future practice-based research.
