Leaving

Although the childhood memories used within the work are real, as is the fact that the artist Kevin Atherton has produced a large number of permanent public sculptures throughout the UK, the central conceit of the work deploys fictional devices in a bid to question the construction of the figure of the artist in a work that is part menippean satire and part poetic eulogy in it’s exploration of the nature of memory and identity in the twenty-first century.
Using real autobiographical memories from his island childhood the artist – ‘out of frame’ – conducts a live performance through a megaphone where he narrates the written contents of a series of five bronze plaques that he would have us believe were recently commissioned from Atherton by the Isle of Man Arts Council and permanently sited at strategic points along the beginning of our voyage.