The sky has been temporarily borrowed for art, 2024
Latex, vinyl letters sticker, curling ribbon, helium
60 x 60 x 1000 (adjustable) cm
This work adopts the sky as both medium and concept to engage with questions of artistic ontology—what art produces, how it reflects perception, and its potential to transform our understanding of the external world. Informed by sustained research into the decentralisation of art institutions, internal structural dynamics, and the evolving role of the artist within exhibition-making, the project seeks to reposition the relationship between artist, institution, and audience. Rather than maintaining a one-directional transmission of meaning from artist to viewer, it encourages a dialogical mode of engagement.
At the heart of the work lies the notion of borrowing—not as an act of appropriation, but as a gesture of humility that foregrounds the external conditions shaping artistic experience. Here, art is not solely produced, but revealed—through both the expressive actions of the artist and the curatorial act itself—drawing upon the symbolic generosity of the sky and its embedded cultural resonance.
The balloon does not merely inhabit the air but occupies the sky as conceptual space. This distinction underscores the infinite, intangible qualities that the sky represents and which the balloon, as a reflective surrogate, gestures toward. The balloon and the sky intersect materially, yet diverge conceptually. If the balloon is understood as an extension of the sky, the work opens onto broader questions: Is the artwork the object itself, the borrowed concept, or the original source? What is the status of such a gesture, and what enduring value might it propose?
These are not questions the artist seeks to answer alone. While the work is presented as 'art', its classification remains deliberately unsettled. Might it exist outside conventional definitions? If not recognised as art, does it lose critical agency—or, if accepted as art, what forms of public engagement might it activate? These inquiries are intended not as didactic propositions, but as invitations to shared reflection—towards a collective process in which the ontology of art is negotiated, rather than prescribed.