Nonument Monument

Artwork of the Month | July

Lucy Dabbs

Too many hours watching Contagion, later, I felt like the only human left alive.

I over-dramatized my life into an inaccurate, epic tech-noir with peripheral Blade Runner vibes. 

Poor, poor me. Stuck in my vacuous ‘shoebox’ of a student room.

On the Strand.

It was around the first Thursday. Half-pre-empting the self-loathing and sick that present me would have to endure, a process that tends to self-recycle, I wrote a few words about my artworks. Quarantine was so invasive and isolating and uncertain. I did enjoy feeling sorry for myself. The positives far outweighed the negatives and I knew it, really. A disgusting and shameful yet, I hope, a very human privilege. A necessary step through polarised marks that drive the waves of our lives. Hard to realise at that moment but from the point of entrance, that dense encasement can be seen for what it is. Admittedly, it is easy to criticise from a new and improved context. 

‘Charge sight from a direct into an alternating current’. This is what came to my head, for no reason, as a way of salving this state through making my artworks. With many objects of misunderstanding, for me, physics is filed under ‘incomplete- dunno’. So again, for no sensible reason, circuit symbols came to mind whilst making sense of the people and world around me. Appropriating the imagery of this hazy memory, I superimposed it onto MONUMENT. It is an incorporeal, non-monument, monument to this. Short direct curves plant on or dive into the surface. A stagnated sculpture or an iceberg hiding a body below the surface- an oscillation that remerges into its twinned arch. What is the concrete floor? Quite literally it’s a grey area. I think it’s an ever-ambiguous, ever-painful to accept, objectification of human fallibility and frustration- not certain.

Sorry, future me.

You can find Lucy's poem that accompanies her artwork on page 15 of Issue 23, Time.