Anton Parsons - Invisible City 2003
Dimensions: H 2200mm, W 1200mm
Location: Corner of Lambton Quay and Grey Street
Tactile: it is made to be touched.
Surface: Invisible City is polished stainless steel, and reflects its surroundings. When looking at it you see a reflection of Wellington.
Sited on the corner of Grey Street and Lambton Quay, Invisible City is a Braille sculpture: two gleaming vertical stainless steel slabs, angled obliquely to one another, with Braille lettering described in French boule-sized hemispheres. The work is by sculptor Anton Parsons; the Braille text by writer and academic Associate Professor (Massey University) Peter Beatson.
For Dr. Beatson the sculpture has a special significance; the poem Invisible City arrayed in large Braille letters is in part an epitaph to his second guide dog, Paisley, who died prematurely in 2001. Dr Beatson began to go blind during his childhood and has been totally blind since his mid-30s. Ziggy, his current guide dog, is his third.
The poem Invisible City is far darker, expressing something of Dr Beatson’s grief at Paisley’s death, which had occurred just days before Parsons invited his collaboration. The poem, says Dr Beatson, was a form of catharsis.
“Paisley’s is the ‘graven seed’, I suppose you could say,” says Dr Beatson. The poem is also dense with other allusions.
“At another level you can also see the poem as being about how lonely blind people can feel in a big city,” he said. “Particularly in Wellington where the wind so easily destroys the sounds that cue you in to where you are.”
For most people the poem Invisible City will itself be invisible. Few sighted people know Braille, and the slabs and the Braille letters are too large to be easily read, even by the blind.
“I suppose it is fitting that the poem does not assert its presence. But I’d like people to know that there is more to the sculpture than meets the eye. It’s fun to know something more, and I’d like to think Paisley is being remembered.”
INVISIBLE CITY
The word made flesh can bleed.
Am I bound or freed?
Embracing visual silence alone
I breed a virtual skin of signs
across the void
but when the fault line ruptures
the word made flesh will bleed.
By the unseen quay
I plant this graven seed
betrayed by the wind
my sonic charts destroyed
tethered sign to skin
I am both bound and freed.
Other Braille works by Anton Parsons:
References:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/2003/masseynews/june/june03/stories/beatson.html
http://www.sculpture.org.nz/engine/SID/10007/AID/1096.htm
http://tworooms.versionproductions.com/anton-parsons/?image=346
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts-literature/news/article.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=10397481
For Dr. Beatson the sculpture has a special significance; the poem Invisible City arrayed in large Braille letters is in part an epitaph to his second guide dog, Paisley, who died prematurely in 2001. Dr Beatson began to go blind during his childhood and has been totally blind since his mid-30s. Ziggy, his current guide dog, is his third.
The poem Invisible City is far darker, expressing something of Dr Beatson’s grief at Paisley’s death, which had occurred just days before Parsons invited his collaboration. The poem, says Dr Beatson, was a form of catharsis.
“Paisley’s is the ‘graven seed’, I suppose you could say,” says Dr Beatson. The poem is also dense with other allusions.
“At another level you can also see the poem as being about how lonely blind people can feel in a big city,” he said. “Particularly in Wellington where the wind so easily destroys the sounds that cue you in to where you are.”
For most people the poem Invisible City will itself be invisible. Few sighted people know Braille, and the slabs and the Braille letters are too large to be easily read, even by the blind.
“I suppose it is fitting that the poem does not assert its presence. But I’d like people to know that there is more to the sculpture than meets the eye. It’s fun to know something more, and I’d like to think Paisley is being remembered.”
INVISIBLE CITY
The word made flesh can bleed.
Am I bound or freed?
Embracing visual silence alone
I breed a virtual skin of signs
across the void
but when the fault line ruptures
the word made flesh will bleed.
By the unseen quay
I plant this graven seed
betrayed by the wind
my sonic charts destroyed
tethered sign to skin
I am both bound and freed.
Other Braille works by Anton Parsons:
From Top left to bottom right:
Gone Fishing 2002 - Fibreglass, polyurethane, paint
Located in the Price Waterhouse Coopers building, Auckland
Numbers 2007 - Anodised aluminium, vinyl 3200dia
Twin Infinities 2007 - Fibreglass, wood, arcylic, light
1800x800x250mm each
There is a paradox to much of Parsons' work. On one hand, his pieces seem to confront the viewer with their large scale, bristling with information or getting in the way, but also offering emptiness. They are highly visible but encoded only for those without sight.
The text in Gone Fishing is so large it becomes unreadable, even to a blind person. And even a blind person with a ladder would have difficulty making sense of Invisible City, with its characters wrapping around all sides of the two stainless steel slabs, with no clue to where each line begins and ends.
"It's about how you see things and how you get information from things, and how some things in life are hidden from you," says Parsons of his sculptures' defiant muteness. "You never know quite how things work and then you'll never figure it out, maybe. Or you'll have a take on it but you might not get it right."
Invisible City and Gone Fishing both use texts written by blind poet and Massey lecturer Peter Beatson, who is also a trustee of the National Radio Reading Service.
One of Parsons' works at Roger Williams Contemporary is a Braille translation of an eye-test chart, which may seem contradictory and mean but, by overtly denying an easy reading, Parsons wants people to consider their own experience of the physicality of his works. By tantalising us with the suggestion of information without giving it away, we will pay more attention to the forms he uses.
His intentions may seem antagonistic but there is also a cosmic poetry in his work - of potentially saying a lot and yet saying nothing. His two-panel Braille piece Twin Infinities is made up of opposites - a black panel and a white panel; one with raised dots and the other concave. It is both positive and negative but combined it cancels itself out.
"There is every combination of numbers," he says, referring to one of his numbered works. "There is nothing really there because there are too many variables. So you get lost in this middle ground of having everything and nothing. Too much information gives you nothing.
References:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/2003/masseynews/june/june03/stories/beatson.html
http://www.sculpture.org.nz/engine/SID/10007/AID/1096.htm
http://tworooms.versionproductions.com/anton-parsons/?image=346
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts-literature/news/article.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=10397481
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