Rob Ireson is a artist/human who creates situations where people can temporarily exist outside of themselves, this creates possibility.
Previous work has taken the form of sculpture, bike machines, collaborative workshops, puppetry, blacksmithing and performance. Originally from the Black Country, he’s currently based in Belfast, but he considers the World his home.
“I will create an intervention in the urban environment utilising a mobile inflatable sculpture to disturb everyday experience and allow people to pause and explore transcendence through improvised sound and movement.
I will locate a space in the city centre, ideally an alley way or narrow street, as I like the idea of the architecture of the street restricting and shaping the inflatable as it expands and subverts the environment of the street, creating a tension between what is the sculpture and what is the environment; a bluring of the line of public and private. The inflation of the space will peformative and a spectacle in itself, but the real art happens when people occupy the interior of the sculpture and interact with each other in this space outside of space.
Once occupied, the activities within the inflatable sculpture create an alternative reality from the one perceived outside.
To keep these spaces both mobile and autonomous I have invented the ”inflat-o-mobile”; a bicycle trailer which both contains the inflatables and serves as a powerful box fan powered by a large battery. This enables the inflatables to be transported by human power, and to be inflated at any site without the need for power connectors. I frame these interventions as post-modern ritual, as they offer the opportunity for self-transcendence. A transcended self can experience intuitively without the trappings of accumulated experience, offering the potential to connect in a way which looks through self-imposed masks and beyond the commodification of self.”
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