Millenium Bug (1998)

Artist's Statement

"Transgressions?": The exhibition consisted of eight large installations and sculptures by me with individual photographic interpretations by photographers Val Adamson and Barry Downard. Val Adamson photographed my works in appropriate outdoor and indoor environments and Barry Downard focused on making viewers more aware of detailed aspects of the works by producing enlarged computer-enhanced photographs of different sections of the sculptures.

In this exhibition I was exploring what we are carrying forward from the past and present into the new Millennium, both positively and negatively, and the works reflect global issues such as AIDs, El Nino, pollution, energy, war, poaching of large endangered mammals, computers and space travel. The base materials for the sculptures consisted of discarded industrial waste from factories that is used in the manufacture of functional fibre products. I chose this medium for its visual appeal and because plastic is a 20th Century invention which has impacted positively and negatively on our planet.

"The Milleneum [Y2K]Bug, The unpredictable collision of high technology and human short-sightedness has been largely perceived as a single event that will occur on January 1 2000. On that day countries' computers and electronic devices are expected to suffer a mental meltdown because of an obscure programming blunder in which two digits instead of four were used to represent years. But as programmers and engineers have begun to delve deeper into the problem it has become clear that the bug is not a single event. Computer experts are striving for a millennium solution". (Ashley Dunn The Mercury 1 September 1998).