Floating Asylum 1998

wood, oil drums, metal, canvas, 210 x 325 x 290 cm

The sculpture Floating Asylum is a raft, made of wood and oil drums which carries an open structure delineating a small room, with a bed, a table, a chair and a sink – not as real objects though, but only their outlines, made in metal.The structure is completely open, except for the door and the window, that usually make the connection between the inner and outer space. The window and the door opening are covered with orange-yellow canvas.
This artwork deals with public and private spaces, and its borders. It is about physical and mental protection. About the paradox of isolation and joining. On the one hand the sculpture is an open structure – the iron frame that forms a transparent separation between the inner and outer space –, and on the other the covering of the window and the door opening gives the space a sense of safety and security, two entities each of us is constantly dealing with in our daily life.

The space, or better, the structure delineating this small room, is floating on oil-drums and is to be placed on the water, or will stand on these oil drums on land. It is empty, transparent and unreal. It is more a mental than a physical space. The sculpture is meant as an invitation to the visitor to fill it with his own ideas and thoughts, his emotions, imagination and his state of mind.
Floating Asylum is also a place of meditation, of silence and contemplation, like a hermit's cell or a desert and far away island. It is a frame that creates room for the immaterial and the indescribable and at the same time it refers to a refuge and a shelter.

installation

2011 © rinihurkmans