Cash, Clash & Climate
Supported by grant award from the Arts Council of England
Meticulously created out of paper, sculptures in this series offer an astonishing collection of carefully considered subjects from the Grenfell Tower tragedy and Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access pipeline to climate debates regarding global coral bleaching events. Maslen & Mehra have created the framework Cash, Clash and Climate in order to ponder questions about the complexities of living today and they invite viewers to follow their train of thought. The sculptures individually pose questions about political, social and economic structures but together they ask how they, in turn, relate to social unrest and environmental issues.
This series of sculptures are based on ceramic plates researched in museums around the world. These include the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, London; Hastings Museum, UK; Mares Museum, Barcelona; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Archaeological Museum and the Turkish and Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul; the Asian Museum of Civilization in Singapore and the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, Italy. Maslen & Mehra fashion the sculptures from humble materials: wire and papier-mâché, completed with a decoupage technique of small tiles of archival prints. The narrative of each original plate is altered to highlight a variety of ideas tied to three themes: Cash, Clash and Climate.
The Cash series draws attention to bank bailouts; Doughnut Economics; credit culture; housing bubbles; tampon tax; quantitative easing; war as big business; the commodification of food staples; and the almost religious status that money has reached in our times.
The Clash series embodies social unrest from London to Athens; Article 475; the refugee crisis; the Grenfell Tower tragedy; Greece and the Eurozone; social media to organise protests; fracking; gun control vs gun rights; and the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access pipeline. Lastly, the Climate series highlights environmental topics such as global coral bleaching events; chronic pollution as a heavy cost for economic power in China; melting ice caps; the opposing views of climate change; El Niño; Natural Capital; and the legacy of radiation from Japan’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima.
The artists have made bespoke stands for the sculptures and invited local street artists, Shuby and Delete, to add to their surfaces, responding to each theme. Some narratives may be familiar to the viewer such as the piece, Polarized, which confronts us with opposing slogans: ‘Global warming is a cruel hoax’ and ‘Climate can’t wait’. Others are less obvious, such as the piece Article 475 which encourages the viewer to look further if they don’t understand the reference. Faith in Fiat questions the shift from commodity money to a fiat system which deems money to have no intrinsic value. The largest piece in the collection, Natural Capital references a system by which natural assets (water, geology, biodiversity, soil, air) and ecosystem services (pollination by insects, recreation, natural flood defences etc.) are given a financial value. Subsequently ,Natural Capital is no longer free to exploit recklessly. Could this alternate economic concept be the key?