“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

_ Dr Seuss

Sculpture

Armstrong’s found-object constructions of everyday materials reflect on the human condition; crafted to give them new form and meaning. Making objects that align to the principles of modern art, Armstrong strives to make poetic connections between these schematic assemblages of ‘ready-mades’ or as Robert Rauschenburg put it “Gifts from the Streets” to memories of life and death.

Re-purposing life’s throwaways, empty vessels and obsolete objects which were once important but now redundant to create mausoleums paying poetic homage to unknown spirits and heroes, without ever losing their original identity. It’s this ‘obsolescence’ that’s become an obsession, like a fragment of time; measured, catalogued and immortalised acting as an enduring reflection on society and a testimony to the passage of time.

Pythia
Mixed Media
D: 660mm W: 300mm H: 1400mm

‘Pythia’ known as the Oracle of Delphi, the high priestess who provided wise and insightful counsel and prophetic predictions and precognitions of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination. The Oracle has a small male hospital urinal sitting on top of a pyramid of timber off cuts, inviting the observer to talk into the receptacle thus becoming supplicant; creating a human connection.

Fountain
Mixed Media
D: 230mm W: 130mm H: 1300mm

A column of hospital urinals, books and ceramic ramekins combine to create ‘Fountain’, a human sized pillar acting as a visual metaphor for life. The hospital urinals mimic Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, which tested the beliefs about art and its role of taste in the art world when first exhibited in 1917. The absurdity and humour of communicating through a urinal, an object to collect human waste, creates the same effect, questioning the futility of our belief systems surrounding our daily rituals.

Toy
Mixed Media
D: 1200mm W: 300mm H: 400mm

Like a relic from an ancient burial chamber, ‘Toy’ is an echo of a childhood memory. An artwork designed to remind the viewer of their mortality, and the shortness and fragility of human life acting as a “Momento Mori” (Remember you must die). Constructed from timber off-cuts with paint tin lids for wheels and on it’s deck sit four house-shaped wooden blocks. The largest is constructed from four pieces of timber creating a cross at the joins, a sign closely associated with Christianity and the crucifix. A piece of thick rope invites the viewer to engage and become part of the cycle of life from birth to death in a playful, yet satirical manner.

Box
Mixed Media
D: 120mm W: 280mm H: 320mm

Field of Reeds
Mixed Media
D: 100mm W: 1920mm H: 1820mm

Standing on rusty stilts two towers stand at eye level like a catafalque, on one sits a chariot like object made of wire, nails and wood, on the other sit three small cement boxes. The ‘Field of Reeds’, title refers to what the ancient Egyptians called the afterlife, ‘known as Aaru; a mirror image of life on earth.’ So when death came, it was only a transition to this other realm.

Chariots
Mixed media
D: 100mm W: 420mm H: 110mm

‘Chariots’ is hand made from wire and packaging cast in cement; filling the void once occupied by the contents of the obsolete container. A interpretation of an ancient ‘burial chariot’; carrying the human spirit to the afterlife, known to the Egyptians as Aaru, a mirror image of one’s life on earth.

‘Horus’ was one of four sons who were a group of gods in ancient Egypt. They were essentially the personifications of the four canopic jars (containers in which the separately mummified organs would be placed), which accompanied mummified bodies.

Son of Horus
Mixed media
D: 110mm W: 360mm H: 1400mm

Phials
Mixed media
D: 100mm W: 820mm H: 160mm

‘Phials’, an assemblage of pharmaceutical and skin care bottles contemplates issues on vanity, the embalming process and our obsession with youth and immortality.

Charon’s Bucket
Mixed media
D: 600mm W: 200mm H: 200mm

Origami boats printed with a montage of news clippings on the theme of death and disaster are arranged with a bucket in this assemblage, highlighting our mortality and the intransigence of life.

Charon in Greek mythology was the ferryman of Hades in the underworld, carrying the souls of the dead across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and the dead.

A wheelbarrow containing portraits of children drawn by Armstrongs late father. ‘Carriage’ was created for the ‘Pyre’ project 2020.

Armstrong’s late fathers old school tie is laid out with two photographs of youth and health on a marble slab.